


DVD Commentary: A Change in Energy

by kvikindi



Category: Stargate Universe
Genre: Coming Out, Discussion of Rape, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, discussion of child abuse, discussion of suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-21
Updated: 2018-06-04
Packaged: 2019-05-09 04:57:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 55,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14709503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kvikindi/pseuds/kvikindi
Summary: A commentary on my story "A Change in Energy."





	1. Chapters 1-26

**Author's Note:**

> Please note that this commentary assumes you've read the entire story.

**1\. Prologue**

I approached the first sentences of the prologue and the next chapter as thesis statements about what it is that motivates Rush and Young throughout the story. Here: “Rush is afraid.” (It’s very similar to the original first sentence, which is “He is afraid.”)

This isn’t an obvious thesis for Rush in some ways. Rush is more often the person who is in control of the situation, who has a plan and a backup plan and a backup plan for that one, who is impervious. But in fact my basic psychological conception of Rush is that of someone who experiences a very basic and profound fear constantly. I drew heavily on the idea of him as someone who grew up in an atmosphere of misery and neglect in which his high level of understanding (as someone extremely gifted) was made unbearable by his high level of powerlessness (as a child). So he developed a somewhat disorganized set of responses: attempting to control situations even at high cost to himself; an inability to tolerate displays of positive emotion, which he tends to find frightening and therefore threatening; a constantly triggered fight-or-flight response caused by the hardwired sense that any stability is only illusory. Basically: he’s afraid.

When I started writing the story, I was relying a bit more heavily on the original chapters. I think it’s not till Chapter 14 that I really radically rewrite one of them. If I had to go back, I’d probably start the story at a different point, because I don’t think this is a good place to start it, probably? It’s a bit confusing, and it’s not clear why exactly the story starts here, when this is neither the first time Rush sits in the interface chair, nor the point at which he merges with the ship. I've tried to ameliorate that by having him make a _deal_ with the AI here, so that this is sort of when he makes the decision? 

In terms of the hints of Gloria we begin to see here: I found Gloria a bit generic in the original story, but I loved the actress who played her on the show, and it was so easy for me to imagine what the Gloria Rush fell in love with would be like: this immensely vivacious, clever, gifted, cultured person who in many ways was the height of what Rush thought a person could be. I tried to drop bits and pieces of what she was like throughout the story, hinting at her background, her temperament. I liked the idea that she might have thrown a glass of wine in Rush’s face at one point, because of _course_ Rush would have deserved it, and it just seemed like she might have had a bit of a temper. Also, there’s a story about Peter Pears doing that to Benjamin Britten at a dinner party once.

 

 

**Chapter Two**

Young’s thesis statement is “Young was looking for Rush.” 

Young is looking for Rush insofar as Young is subconsciously searching for someone who can break him out of the box he’s trapped in. He talks about Rush as an escape artist, and that frustrates him about Rush, but I think it’s also why he’s drawn to Rush. He (Young) is someone who, at this point, has failed in a lot of ways and is pretty unhappy as a person. He doesn’t understand why he can’t do the things that are expected of him. His marriage broke down. He couldn’t make things work with TJ. He was never a father. He’s not a good military commander. And we start to realize gradually that he’s repressed a lot of longings that could explain these failures, and that perhaps his real problem is that he’s been pushed to do things that are not in his nature! 

Rush, I think, is threatening to Young for precisely the same reason that he becomes attractive: Rush refuses to submit to or even to acknowledge normative expectations. Rush won’t follow orders. Rush hacks. Rush deceives. Rush subverts. Rush is, later, totally insouciant about his own bisexuality. Rush does the things Young subconsciously wishes he could do, but feels he can’t. 

This chapter is largely set-up and, again, if I were to go back I’d probably stray further from the original template. I do like Rush’s theatrics in the mess, though.

 

**Chapter Three**

I hadn’t yet, when working on this chapter, come up with the idea that Rush and Young would share dreams, so it’s interesting that I still had really laid the groundwork for it in the paragraph about how often and how vividly Young dreams of Earth. I was very interested in what it would actually be like, experientially, to be stuck on this starship. I thought it would be a bit like living in Antarctica. 

The musings on atonement and being tied up with someone you’ve hurt: I wanted to get at the idea that Young feels a connection to Rush that isn’t really about guilt, but is simply there, in a way he doesn't yet understand. Of course, the “He felt like he was a part of Rush. Like Rush was a part of him.” is a bit of foreshadowing.

In writing the way that Rush gets trapped in the chair, I wanted the ship to do more than simply physically force him to sit in it. The idea that the ship might exploit what it knows of his fears (especially from the episode in which the fear tick caused him to hallucinate being trapped in a Nakai tank) in order to drive him to make the choice was interesting to me. This to me seemed like exactly the type of move that the AI, at this stage, would make: it’s an act that’s sophisticated in its understanding of motivation, but also shows a completely ignorance of the emotional consequences of the act. It doesn't intend to damage or hurt Rush— it just doesn't understand how much this particular move will damage and hurt him.

We also have the premiere here of Rush getting furious when he thinks that someone’s treating him like an infant/child, which has to do with the issue of agency. Rush is desperate to assert agency, which he often does by arranging for something terrible to happen to him so that he can then say _he_ did it, rather than admit it was done _to_ him. He’s most likely to get angry and yell at people about treating him like a child when he’s being protected or comforted, which is, of course, not the way that _he_ was actually treated as a child. His relationship to childishness is quite a complex one, because he  _is_ often a bit childish, I think because of how fraught the question of agency is for him.

I went back and played with the ending to have it end with the screen flashing PERCENT COMPLETE, which I liked as a way to lay groundwork for the debate over what it means to be complete— later, in The Two-Body Problem, Rush specifically struggles with the question of whether he is "one hundred percent him."

 

**Chapter Four**

The premiere of the idea of sentient Ancient technology. The line about Atlantis getting sad when Sheppard goes on vacation gets a lot sadder after you’ve read the Sheppard chapter towards the end, although that wasn't intentional,

I love Eli’s idea that now the ship will have a friend, and Rush will have a friend. He’s not wrong, either— it just doesn't happen in the way he expected. 

The story about Sheppard and the Ancient temple was a key development point. I knew that I wanted the AI to look like Sheppard for Young, and I knew I wanted it to be because there’d been this unexplored sexual tension between them that Young had never acknowledged. (Though: I also just profoundly disliked the idea of the AI appearing as Emily. There are two reasons for this: (1) part of the reason that I chose to portray Young as a closeted gay man was because his relationships with women on the show were so unbelievably thin and unpleasant, and Emily especially was _awful_. It made sense to me that the reason he was incapable of having meaningful romantic relationships with women was because, well, he wasn’t actually attracted to women. It seemed to me that his relationship with Emily was not at all substantial enough to support the complexity of the AI appearing as her. (2)Having the AI appear as lost wives just struck an uncomfortable note for me. There are some problematic readings of gender in that idea. With Emily, it also makes the AI into this harridan, which I didn’t like at all.) But part of what was important in having Sheppard appear in the story was the characterization of Sheppard. I’m very interested in haunted or otherwordly portrayals of Sheppard in which his “one of the guys” football/surfer shtick is a little bit of a deliberate calculation to try and mask the fact that there’s something just slightly _off_ about him. It made sense to me that the closest Young might have come to even getting in the area of acknowledging his attraction to men would have been with someone who’s, like Rush, a little bit outside of the box. 

Young has no idea wtf a frequentative form is. 

Young is NOT going to be Rush’s sidekick!

You can track how Young’s perception of what’s going on inside Rush’s head and the ship gets more detailed and nuanced as he goes on, especially after he becomes part-Rush. Nevertheless, I went back after the fact and added some fragmented Rush-thoughts here to give a more immediately and visceral sense of Young getting struck by the contents of Rush's mind, because I realized that I wanted him (and the audience) to immediately be having to puzzle over and decode some of Rush's thoughts.

Ah, the premiere of the Ancient language! It would evolve as it went along; at this point, I at least knew that I was relying upon somewhat Proto-Italicized Latin and Proto-Italic grammar, so that we see the ablative used for location here, and the idea of how the verb “dolhere” works, which is pretty typical for a lot of languages.

I was thinking the other day about whether I would now not entirely write out the idea of the chair “crucifying” Rush. I don’t think it really _does_ anything in the story— it has small practical effects, like conveniently slowing him down, but beyond that I found it frustrating. I probably would cut it. I minimized it as much as possible. 

On the other hand, it allows for the reciprocal nature of this first exchange, which I think is very important: the idea that the first thing that happens to Young and Rush is that they’re able to feel what Wittgenstein calls “pain in someone else’s body.” The grammar of the self has been changed for them. I worry that if one isn’t working off this reference, the ending to this chapter might feel a bit strange. (It is, fyi, the original ending beat.) But, oh, well.

 

**Chapter Five**

Ah, the premiere of the cave and the weather. I thought for a bit about how I wanted to express the connection between Young and Rush. It didn’t work for me to have it expressed abstractly; I wanted something concrete, and something that I could return to throughout the story. I think that in thinking of the cave I was slightly thinking of the Siebenberg House in Jerusalem, where this ordinary house sits over a huge archaeological excavation, but also partly of the Son Doong Cave in Vietnam, which looks like it has a whole world inside it. To me, the image of the cave gives the sense that Rush’s mental landscape is profoundly alien to Young, but the idea of it being “under the floorboards” also hints at the notion that they’re not so far apart, and also that some aspects of Rush's alienness are the "buried" or repressed elements of Young.

Probably one of the most important lines in these early chapters is Young’s fear that Rush is going to “bring the house down.” Houses play a really central role in this story. Here, Young has an orderly mental house and Rush is an unstoppable force of chaos that’s going to tear it apart. The house is linked to heteronormativity, probably, or just to _normativity_ — Young trying to police what is and isn’t allowed in it, trying to maintain a certain kind of order. And Rush is threatening to collapse all of that. Later, they manage to find a different kind of house to coexist in— one that provides a framework for them, but that is also expanding and changing constantly, which is really teh ideal.

I’ve always liked the dream of Rush’s that Young eavesdrops on here— the one in which Rush has to put his hands through the locks of the doors. It seemed to sum up the situation well. 

When Young brings their minds together while Rush is is in the infirmary, we get one of the first big missteps for Young in terms of making a reference he doesn’t yet know he’s making: he thinks about Rush as someone who’s fundamentally broken, which is of course what Telford called Rush on Icarus, though Young doesn't know this yet. (But I did, because I'd already written that memory of Rush's.)

 

**Chapter Six**

Quite quickly here we get the first mention of Rush’s violent aversion to being “owned” or “having a “keeper” or being on a “leash.” This has to do with the bigger issue of agency, but it tends to specifically come up with regards to Telford, who we later learn (or, at least, it’s suggested through various little flashback clues) used to joke about Rush being his pet scientist, and who played a lot of control games with Rush. And, of course, in the Telford interlude, Rush explicitly refers to himself as signing his body over to Telford. So in a lot of ways Telford _did_ own him, and Rush suffered hugely as a result. This is one of the reasons why Rush's phobia of being held down is both a practical one related to actually having been held down by Telford  _and_ a metaphorical one— he's afraid of being controlled, even in the most innocent ways.

A few things appear in Young’s experience of Rush’s mind that are explained later: the fear of being locked in, and specifically the lock on the door; the transmitter; the taste of bitumen; the stars outside the window. 

The little exchange about plays and libraries seems so crucial to me. First of all, Rush: “It’s a play. One doesn’t read plays.” That’s Rush-who-was-married-to-Gloria, who learned all these rules about the intellectual middle class and lived by them. And I mean— to a profoundly gifted, highly literate person with a love for beauty who was raised on a council estate by parents who shared none of his interests, I think there’s something attractive about these rules, and about being able to use them to show that you're cultured. For Young, on the other hand, it’s far less fraught. It’s not about power. So he’s not really insulted. 

Shout out, incidentally, to the Montana library system, which sustained me for a year. I’m sure Wyoming’s also great.

I liked the idea that Young would consider it sort of dishonorable to comment on Rush’s childhood. He does call Rush fucked-up pretty soon, but even then he doesn’t speculate about where that comes from. It’s interesting to contrast this with the little bit of pre-lab Rush and Telford we get, much later, when Telford calls Rush a street rat. That’s a slightly different dynamic, because Telford admits that he comes from similar circumstances. But even so. 

“It’s not that hard! Stop acting and just be more normal!” This is a really important thought for what it reveals about Young and the way he operates in the world. He thinks that he can just be “normal” if he tries to be, and doesn’t see why Rush can’t do the same.

Already, at the end of this chapter, we have a sense that something is going on for Rush under the surface— that “don’t block me out” has slightly more resonance than Young is aware of. Rush has attached himself to Young. And we realize later that the severing with the communication stones that’s going to happen soon affects him severely and lastingly in part because it strikes directly at a place where he’s already wounded— he desperately, desperately needs someone to rely on, but is also deeply fearful of relying on anyone. So he sort of can’t help attaching himself to Young. And it seems like this is in many ways an ideal and reliable connection, because Young  _can't_ abandon him. But then Young does, however unintentionally, which plays out Rush's deepest fears.

 

**Chapter Seven**

This was a significant chapter for me in terms of editing, because I felt that I didn’t want to write a lot of new material (as it’s fairly straightforward action), but wanted to dramatically condense what was in the original story in order to focus on key events. I also knew that I wanted to have Rush and Young merge fully into one consciousness, and I wanted to reflect that in my prose style.

Rush joins here with the ship for the first time, which causes him to flash back to the Ancient world, and then we get the first hint of the idea of Rush as made up of threads, as he’s “unspooled” through the cavern and then snaps back into apposition with Young. I don’t know why I never brought back the Ancient musical instrument I mention here. I remember doing a lot of research about bowed instruments of the ancient world in order to decide on a name.

And… some stuff happens…and then… Rush and Young become one person for the first time. I was really looking forward to this. They have very distinct narrative voices, and I wanted to be able to suggest something of each of them in their combined style. We get some of Rush’s hectic, minimally punctuated sentences mixed in with a sense of inner dissonance where we can see some feeling of Young’s (“which was all right they’ll admit it a substantially riskier move than they might have liked but it can’t be helped so just bite down on the terror”), Rushian sentiments and what I think is Rush’s tendency to avoid thoughts (“Iterations were calming”; “because if they did not but this conditional was not helpful so they set it aside”); and then Rushian panic combined with Youngian reassurance (“They did not like this, fuck, but it was okay, this was what they were built for, this was what they were trained for”). I tried to use this pattern in all of the cases where they become one person.

Later on we’ve got the AI-as-Sheppard and another hint at Young and Sheppard’s “fraught fucking friendship,” before Rush gets lost in the ship for the first time.

Here Rush isn’t threads but is definitely pieced out in a way that Young is trying to get a sense of. I’m fond of the image of Rush as a cloud of lightning bugs. The image of the broken teacup reassembling perhaps inevitably references _Hannibal_ in a way that adds something here— because Rush _is_ a broken teacup that _does_ , in the end, learn to reassemble in a sense.

I went back after the fact and reworked the conversation between Rush and Young at the end, which I wasn't happy with. The new version has Young thinking of Rush in the context of nervous wild animals, which is a recurring and important image (given that Rush is afraid); it also brings up the discourse of knowing that takes place between them (the question of knowing each other, and what it means to know another person); it has the faintest hint of intimacy in the touch they don't realize they've sustained; and it has Young perceiving his role as putting Rush back together— which is, of course, true.

 

**Chapter 8**

One of the running themes of my version of this story is materiality. It’s a lot more material in its focus than FoD. That shows up mostly with the sex, later, but here we see it in that when I was imagining why Young would be particularly angry with Rush in this chapter, it made sense to me that, well, Young’s just had his ass kicked by this planet that _Rush_ wanted him to go to, and meanwhile Rush has just been swanning around in the air conditioning, hanging out with the ship, and now Young is beat-up and sore and tired and Rush is being an asshole! 

In the original version of this chapter, what they found on the planet was a video recording. But I just couldn’t imagine a video recording of Ancients. That felt wrong. Ancients have to have holographic projections or something, you know, quasi-magical. So I made this Ancient captain a holographic projection, and turned him into a little bit more specific of a character, and also gave him some actual Ancient to speak. One of the benefits of having him be a projection was that he felt a bit more _present_ , and I was interested in what that would be like for Rush and the AI. It introduces this notion that the Ancients are not far away for Rush and the AI. There’s this sense of longing for something that's been lost. The sadness of the AI gets introduced here, when it shows up to watch the projection.

I wanted the tenor of the showdown between Rush and Young to be one of betrayal, and of Young saying all the wrong things as Rush does what Rush always does: hurt himself so that he feels like he’s got one over on the person who was trying to control him. Young’s analysis of the situation is pretty astute: he’s being manipulated by Rush, made to play the villain/aggressor, which is a role he doesn't want. But he reacts in the wrong way; he calls Rush manipulative and implies he’s exactly like Telford, which of course is what Telford has told Rush, and what Rush doesn’t want to (but does, on some level) believe.

Later, in the infirmary, we get one of Rush’s patented “I’m fine”s, and his violent resistance to being given the comfort he so desperately needs.

And then the first Chloe & Rush scene! It’s a very different side of Rush than anything we’ve seen so far. He’s funny and careful and honest with her. I went back and did some revisions on this scene a bit later, when I had a better sense of who Chloe was… She’s extremely insightful, though she sometimes expresses herself in slightly childlike ways. I like to think that there’s already a hint here of who she is as a person, and what motivates her: that she herself is trying to work through this experience of transformation.

 

**Chapter 9**

“With Rush, the lines always seemed to get crossed” stands out as an important line, almost a summary of who Rush is at this point, especially for Young.

In this conversation between Young and AI, we get the first real hints that there’s something going on with Young and Sheppard, and that Young is maybe working hard not to know what it is. The line “People… don’t like to be reminded of what they can’t have” was a very deliberate one. “Friendship?” the AI asks. Hmm.

The AI’s line about “what is the difference between you and your arm” is one that’s an important thought problem to have in mind as the story becomes more and more about cohering and decohering bodies. I’m amazing that that’s a line from the original story, because it’s so much something I would have written.

There’s a hint here that the AI is having to reevaluate what it is and isn’t capable of, and perhaps that it’s capable of lying to itself. It insists that it doesn’t have the capacity to be happy or unhappy, but we suspect that it does. In some ways the AI behaves like a very, very severely traumatized person in its inability to recognize or articulate its emotions, and its uncertainty about its own capabilities for feeling.

Materiality alert— we get the idea that one of the autonomic functions of Young’s body has become holding onto Rush.

THE FIRST TELFORD CLUE! I had already written the Telford lab scene, so this was cribbed directly from that, and I wonder if I would choose to write a different version now? I wonder if the later version is Rush filtered through Young and this is meant to be more Rush. I don’t quite know.

Some sentient technology here that speaks to Rush, that responds to him, that wants him, and that’s perhaps slightly frightening in its hunger. And we have Rush thinking of himself as _wrong_ , which is significant. Even before his neurological transformation, even before he's really reckoned with his abandonment of Gloria, he already thinks that.

I changed some dialogue here later to make it a little bit creepier. And we get the dream fragments, the first suggestion of a possibly-sexual relationship between Telford and Rush, and the notion that Telford has _done_ something permanent to Rush’s body. I’ll comment more on this in chapter 13, but I’m surprised when people don’t find the laboratory scene to have more of a rape vibe. I think it _should_ , because of the questions of bodily autonomy involved. And a little of that vibe leaks in here.

I love Rush and Young’s little back-and-forth about whether TJ’s cleared Rush, which I think is mostly drawn from the original story? The notion that Rush will never say even the simplest thing shows up again with Destiny Bingo, later.

Okay, so since Camile and Young’s conversation is essentially an edited version of what was in the original story, I’ll take this moment to comment on why I opted to have Rush and Telford be ex-lovers, which was _not_ the case in the original story. I found it strange that the possibility was dangled in the original story but ruled out, and for me it was too intriguing an idea to let go of. Everything that happened between them became so much darker, more powerful, and more complex if they were lovers. It fitted beautifully into some other specific plans I had, which I’ll discuss later. It just worked! And I think there’s something thematically compelling about it that helps to separate Young and Telford, who are foils for each other in many ways. Telford has this relationship with Rush but still treats him as an object. Young refuses to treat Rush as an object, and that’s ultimately perhaps the most transformative thing for Rush.

This climax of Rush and Young separating contains some key things: we see that, as I mentioned earlier, Rush is already really attached to Young. More attached than he should be, probably. We also see Rush’s absolute refusal to let go of people he has any kind of attachment to, even when it means imperiling himself. 

 

**Chapter Ten**

Sam Carter! Poor Sam.

Then Young’s back on Destiny, reflecting on Rush and Telford in another paragraph that has a rape-y vibe. 

Action-y stuff. Wray is a badass. 

Then we’re back on Destiny, and TJ is quite rightly questioning how and whether Young is better than Telford, which is one of the crucial questions of a big part of the story. And probably without meaning to, Young gives the reason: he cares about not hurting Rush. 

First instance of Young punching a wall because he can’t punch anything else. I think there are three in the story? Maybe more.

The scene with Eli is mostly from the original story.

And then we get me exploring my idea of the inner world of this link— the first depiction of not-quite-Rush as a little animal, which I liked and continue to like a lot. There’s hints of thread-Rush here, existing in parts throughout the ship that can let go in little bits, tendrils that have to be sewed-up together. And then shattered Rush, which I worked _so_ hard on and whichI think is still absolutely perfect. God, how good is that formalist parachute quote??? I found that _by accident_ in a book I was reading about mathematical infinities. And it’s just SO something Rush would have quoted about the Icarus Project, and Telford _wouldn’t_ have liked it. And we get the first reference to the California sun. And we get me very proud of having learned how to notate music in GUIDO.

This is the first instance of Rush and Young really touching. And there’s a hint here, in Rush’s weather cycling through unintelligible sounds and colors, that it’s very significant to him that Young was upset about what happened, and that Young wanted to fix things. I think that Rush spends a lot of this story being confused by Young, because Young’s basic decency is not what he’s experienced from many other people. I think that probably in his whole life Gloria was the only person he ever felt safe with— I have thoughts on how I think their relationship was not totally healthy in other ways, largely because Rush just wasn’t capable of having a healthy relationship with _anyone_ at that point in his life, but she was the first person whom he could rely on and whom he could trust to care for him and not hurt him. But having lost her has probably reinforced his sense of what the world is like, i.e. unreliable, violent, and full of abandonment.

 

**Chapter Eleven**

THE DREAMS BEGIN. 

This is a double delight: the first substantial look at Young’s relationship with Sheppard, AND the first dream-slipping between Rush and Young.

Young and Sheppard first: I have this intense fascination with what the daily lives of people in the stargate program would be like, so I loved this idea of Young coming off a mission and being gatelagged and just feeling out of it, and then running into Sheppard, who’s forgotten that the concept of wallets exists. This takes place, if you’re not an SGA fan, during a very weird two-part episode where a single ship of Ancients shows up and is like, “Hey, we’d like our city back, if that’s cool,” and because SGA is basically a charming trash show, no one is like, “Uhhhhhhhhhhhh can you maybe TRANSLATE your TABLETS OF KNOWLEDGE for us or like EXPLAIN SOME SHIT or ET FUCKING CETERA” and instead they’re basically like, “Okay, we’ll go home, then,” so everyone goes back to Earth for a while and is miserable. So that’s why Sheppard’s living in his terrible apartment drinking himself into a stupor: because he thinks he’s never going to get to go back to Atlantis. THIS TERRIBLE APARTMENT COMPLEX BECOMES IMPORTANT MUCH LATER. We also get another big hint here about Young’s sexuality. 

This is the only time that Young goes into one of Rush’s dreams, I think? Which in retrospect I hate, because I think it’s confusing— the rules of what's happening become unclear. But I was winging it, and I didn’t know what was going to happen with the dreams yet. And now I don’t want to rewrite it, because I really like Rush’s dream, and what Young says in it. I particularly like Rush being distressed that Young won't stay in the box Rush has put him in, because of course Rush is opposed to the very notion of boxes, yet he doesn't like that Young keeps transgressing this one boundary between them.

(I should note that I am incapable of thinking about someone being put in a box without immediately following that up with: "You can't put me in a box!" "Who's trying to put you in a box? Have you contacted the police?" (See: The Mighty Boosh.)

First case of Rush and Young literally sleeping together, and also of Young showing absentminded tenderness towards Rush.

When Rush wakes up, we get Rush not wanting to be held down, which of course is a running thing.

Lots of this conversation is largely from the original story; I loved “I don’t know what a town hall meeting is, and I don’t want to know” too much to give it up.

First example of Rush liking to be petted by Young, even though obviously he’d never admit it here. He just doesn’t object.

I think that, again, if I’d been feeling freer, I’d have rewritten the end of this section, with the power bar. I like that they share the power bar, and it’s the first tentative gesture of friendliness Rush makes towards Young, but I think I’d have been able to come up with something stronger. And even though I bring back “the best things always do” _much_ much later, I’m not sure how I feel about that little bit of Destiny showing up.

The conversation between Young and Telford— I love writing Telford. Some bits of this are from the original story, and some aren’t. I think the foregrounding of the weirdly rape-y vibe is me (“He went crying to you about how we forced him”), and I set up a significant change, which is that Telford assumed the project failed and is now discovering that it succeeded enough to get him what he wanted. Oh, and Rush himself being Telford’s project. To me, that was a good way of examining the question of objectification: Telford treats Rush as an object, and Rush treats himself like an object. (Which, I’ll note, assumes that objects are lower down in the ontological hierarchy than non-objects, i.e. people, which I don't necessarily agree with, but.)

The lines “Secrets”/“You tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine” show up again in Ancient in Rush’s brain later.

Rush sleeping in Young’s quarters for the first time! And the weed sprouting in the garden of Young’s mind, which is both an indication that tenderness is taking root in him, and also a really good way of pointing towards the idea that Rush is starting to disrupt the carefully regulated order of Young’s life.

 

**Chapter Twelve**

This is the chapter I altered least from the original— I edited everything, added the dream at the beginning, and wrote loops 14, 24, and parts of 4 and 13. I thought: why wouldn’t Rush have just proved to Young that he was telling the truth by showing him the memories? Well, the obvious answer is that Rush would rather do almost anything than let Young into his head. So we have Young suggesting it in loop 4 and 14, and then by loop 24 Rush gives in, but of course Young doesn’t believe him. There’s the other note in loop 14 that when Young says “Nothing’s changed since last night,” and Rush says, “I know,” they’re not really talking about the same thing, and that’s why Rush is despairing— because he’s afraid of what that means. 

The dream— lord, the amount of insta-research I did to determine if it was realistic for Young to have done his first deployment in Somalia, and what Mogadishu would have looked like at that point, and what Mogadishu looked like in general… But I like the dream. I like the idea of Rush running away from Young as Young is trying to rescue him, and I like Rush’s catty commentary.

The conversation between Young and Rush when Young wakes up is, here, a response to Rush realizing that he’s been dreaming Young’s dream, and freaking out a little about the idea that he’s getting too close to Young. 

 

**Chapter Thirteen**

Obviously the main thing in this chapter is THE STORY OF RUSH AND TELFORD _,_ but there are a couple of other important things: the story of Gloria and Rush meeting, which I’m very fond of (and which I got to ornament with my recently-acquired Oxford knowledge), and also the experience of the chair pulling Rush in, which I’m still pretty proud of. I went back after the fact and edited this chapter a bit, adding some of Rush's fragmented thoughts as the chair pulls at him, because I couldn't resist the opportunity to do so. 

But, okay. Rush and Telford. I wrote parts of this back in December; it was one of the first things I wrote, because I just wanted to write my own version of what had happened. I think there are a few things in this chapter that maybe feel a little bit like not what the story is about but about things that are very important to me personally, and they show up in Young’s journey through the interface at the beginning as well as, oddly, in the earlier glimpse of the interface chair— the idea that comprehending is an experience of aloneness for Rush, that it’s what makes him different from other people, and that it’s a wound that reopens, as well as the idea that part of what the ship offers him is a mind that can move at the pace of his own. 

Note that the prose here is _not_ the Rush narrative voice we’ve gotten before, which is deliberate: this is the old Rush, who’s better-organized.

I like the little punning exchange that we get between Rush and Gloria— forte/subito forte, temper/tempo. 

We start to get a little bit into some of the ways that their relationship might not have been perfect— Rush _can’t_ be angry with her, because he doesn’t want her to see him angry or understand his anger. And we get a brief glimpse here of what he wanted her not to know— I didn’t want to be very explicit, because I think that childhood abuse is one of those topics that’s overrepresented, often through tropes, to the point that it’s hard to represent in a way that feels real or meaningful. There are a few significant image fragments that repeat throughout the story to suggest Rush’s childhood: the underwater-smelling wallpapered kitchen, the radio that gets thrown through the window during the 1974 World Cup, and the door with the cheap lock that he throws himself against. So a couple of those show up here.

The idea that Rush didn’t want to see Gloria— that he feels terribly, terribly guilty because he didn’t want to see her, and because he was able to escape into this fantastical world of space adventure— is one of my big changes, and comes partly from the experience of having spent a week watching my grandmother die in hospice, and observing other people’s reactions. I think it’s a very natural response to not want to see someone you love suffering, and to not want to watch them die, and to not want to enter into these buildings and these spaces that are totally dedicated to death. And if you’re an emotionally healthy person, and a person who has friends to talk these things over with, then presumably you realize that this is a normal thing to feel, and you go through the process of helping the person who’s dying die, and you move through it. But Rush is an emotionally unhealthy person whose only friend is Telford, who’s under immense pressure from the SGC, who’s facing losing the absolute center of his life, so of course he believes he’s feeling this way because he’s a bad person, and he can’t deal with it, and he lets Telford manipulate him into leaving, and that’s basically the end of his life, as far as he knows, for a long time. 

We see an example of Telford gaslighting Rush here, where Rush genuinely doesn’t know anymore if there was anything he could have done for Gloria— he doesn’t even know if he thought then that there was. Basically, Telford told him that there wasn’t, and he had allowed Telford to become the arbiter of what he knew and didn’t.

A prominent violinist and professional orchestrator once told me that he hated the Tchaikovsky violin concerto because it was cheap and showy, and I was so mad that now, more than ten years later, I am compelled to write my disagreement into fics!!!

Why does Mandy show up in this fic? She really shouldn’t. She’s confusing for people not familiar with the show, and she was so terrible as a character that she appears nowhere else. I suppose she does provide some necessary tension here. (She’s in the original.)

We get a preview here of Nicholas Rush who’s going to be not-Nicholas-Rush but stronger! better!

I went back after the fact that rewrote the AI interlude, because I didn't feel it was quite working. There's now the discussion of whether being loved is  _enough_ , which is an idea that comes back much later, significantly. There's also a discussion of what can and can't be fixed— there's a sense that the AI has offered Rush the chance to fix things  _for Gloria,_ as much as he can, but that he doesn't feel this will fix  _him_ — that he is essentially broken beyond fixing, which is why he can't ascend. It's true, of course, that some things can't be fixed, but what Rush learns is that they can still be  _survived_ in a meaningful sense. They can be lived past.

And then, after the AI interlude, we have Rush realizing what a terrible mistake he’s made, when Telford just looks at him curiously. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry” comes back later— a Telford classic. 

Several important phrases or moments here, some of which are in the original: Rush begging Telford for his life, Telford saying, “Don’t fight this,” Telford gaslighting Rush again so that Rush isn’t actually sure if he had known or suspected or not known what was going to happen, and whether he wanted it or not, Telford telling Rush that no one knows Rush like him, and that he’s glad he got to do this… and then the touching and the kiss, and the order to let go. 

I mentioned before that this scene has a strong rape vibe to me (which I probably accentuated). This becomes more vivid if you think about the most outwardly obvious lasting effect of what happens here, which is that Rush becomes terrified of anyone holding him down. That comes up at several points, but most saliently, for clear reasons, when he’s in bed with Young. It was difficult to write that and have it _not_ feel like writing someone who was a rape survivor. It doesn’t help that (as Young doesn’t yet know here) the person who’s doing this to Rush is someone he’s been sleeping with. But I’m also not sure that matters? It’s a scene of profound violation, _bodily_ violation, and I’m not sure how often we see scenes of violation that _don’t_ involve rape? Or perhaps we don’t acknowledge how violating various forms of bodily trauma can be. The key thing that happens here, really, is that Rush begs Telford to stop hurting him and Telford instead treats Rush as though his desires are not legitimate, “as though Rush is his to do with as he pleases,” and hurts him more. So. I’m not quite sure what to make of that. 

This is really the central trauma that Rush is working through in this story, though in some ways it’s difficult to separate from his childhood trauma, as the two resonate with one another so profoundly, and I think that his relationship with Telford would certainly not have happened without what happened to him as a child (as I discuss later). It has a much more profound effect than anything that happened to Rush with the Nakai does. It’s his core experience of being objectivized, being stripped of agency, being made subject to someone else’s desires and will. And I think that even though it’s terrible that this is exposed to Young here without either of them consenting to that exposure, it’s still probably really… a positive accident of sorts? Because Rush would _never_ have shared that experience— certainly would not have shared the level of panic, fear, powerlessness, grief, and violation he felt— and the fact that Young has access to it allows him to begin making sense of some of Rush’s behavior, and allows him to be a somewhat sensible voice later, when he’s basically like, “It is fucking crazy that you will still let this person close to you, and your justifications for it are fucking crazy.”

BTW I think you can see the seeds in Rush’s attempt to let go here of my disagreement with the traditional idea of ascension, which will later blossom forth into a new approach.

 

**Chapter Fourteen**

This was one of the first chapters where I really went in and completely redid the original structure, because it wasn’t working for me. In some ways this whole chapter is an infodump where Rush lays out his history with the SGC, but it can’t be _just_ that. 

The Scottish accent here still torments me, because I like the idea of Rush’s accent slipping, and Robert Carlyle _does_ have an incredibly thick Glasgow accent (he _literally_ says “aye” and “havenae” and “didnae”), but there’s no way to represent that in text without having it seem faintly stereotypical and ridiculous. I tried to rely on dialect words rather than phonetic representations of the accent, as much as possible; I did some deep diving into Glasgow slang. I wanted to keep the idea that Rush has put a lot of work into intellectual/class mobility, and that this is still important for him to preserve— that he’s essentially tried to erase his origins, as though they themselves are a form of trauma, but can’t ever quite.

There’s a lot of talk about genius in this chapter, which is just me working out various discontents, really.

Rush starts out, here, very uncomfortable with materiality. He’s someone who lives almost entirely in his head. And we get a glimpse of why: he sees the world he comes from as being a material world, an animal world, an uncivilized world in which his smallness gets him beaten down, and that’s tied in with his complicated relationship with his parents. I think this is the closest we get to a real glimpse of his family in action, and I chose this scene because it seemed to communicate so many ideas: his giftedness makes him completely unintelligible to his parents, so much so that his father questions his legitimacy; but imagine, also, being a kid and seeing yourself as the cause of the violence between your parents: understanding yourself to be  _wrong_ in a way that only creates problems. That's a foundational experience for Rush.

The idea really emerges here of a divide between two mindsets: Rush-as-tool and Rush-as-person. As Young notes, Rush himself has the former mindset. He seems determined not to allow himself to view himself as a person, as something that can be cold and scared. But Young is horrified by this mindset, and determined not to fall into it.

And we see the results of Telford’s gaslighting here, or perhaps Rush’s need to take control of events: Rush refuses to admit that something terrible was done to him.

And the beginnings here of Young’s very un-self-aware jealousy of Telford— he _hates_ the idea of Rush having slept with Telford, even before he knows why; he just knows that it upsets him.

I actually have trouble figuring out parking signs, which is where that idea comes from.

Really Young’s response here is something that he develops as a successful tactic throughout the story: defusing Rush’s explosions with gentle humor. I think this is the first time he tries it. 

Foreshadowing here: Young _won’t_ , of course, do what Telford did, which is exactly what Rush is afraid of, and what becomes excruciatingly painful for them both. 

The idea of Rush being in the trenches of the ocean comes back much later.

Annnnnd we get a flashback to a very significant Telford remark: the description of Rush as broken, a throwaway comment that impacted Rush tremendously and continues to be a kind of trigger for him. To be broken is unacceptable to Rush, because it’s a state of powerlessness, and because it’s what he suspects to be true of himself. I think at base, though he would deny it and though it’s illogical, he feels there’s something that was always wrong with him, something that prevented him from being loved the way that other people are loved; then when he left Gloria to die alone, and was literally shattered by Telford’s experiment, that belief was given reasonable source and form. So now he absolutely believes himself to be broken, and reacts violently against anyone articulating this idea precisely for that reason. 

Is Telford a bad person? I’m still not sure.

I tried to work in a thing towards the end of the story about one of Rush’s guilty favorite foods being chip butties, which a Scottish friend once tried to make me eat in Glasgow, to my horror. So I don’t think he’s lying when he says he likes really greasy chips.

There's a significant moment here at the end that Young remembers many times after this, when he takes Rush’s glasses off. It’s such an ordinary, domestic moment. And in fact if you read carefully, the end of the Gloria interlude ends with a description of her and Rush reading in bed, and him starting to fall asleep and her taking his glasses off. Rush is very frightened of permitting that kind of domestic tenderness to touch him again, after such a devastating experience of abandonment, and I think the fact that he climbs into bed with Young here is more significant than Young realizes.

 

**15\. In Dreams Begins Responsibility**

This is the first start-to-finish wholly original chapter. 

A number of important things are introduced here: the marbles, for one, and the Bechstein piano, and, of course, Young pulling Rush out of Rush’s dreams into a number of landscapes that will go on to recur in the story. 

The Schubert arpeggione sonata is something I became familiar with through the arrangement for piano and cello that Britten and Rostropovich recorded. So far as I know there isn’t an arrangement for violin and piano, but I figure Gloria and Rush could have worked one out. 

Gloria’s opinions about various composers here are basically my opinions. And I think she's right in her reading of Rush.

“Not everything is a fight you have to win” recurs several times; Young says it to Rush later.

A broken E string is a deadly weapon! 

Note that when Rush gets pulled into Young’s mind, his narrative voice becomes orderly and more intelligible— Young provides the structure that Rush needs in order to organize his thoughts more clearly. 

So already here in the waking sections Young is unconsciously holding Rush to him, and Rush pretty clearly _profoundly_ wants that, but won’t allow himself it. 

I love the nightmare about Chloe, because it says so much. Rush sees Chloe as being very like himself, and the version of her that _is_ himself in the dream (as all characters in dreams are the dreamer) challenges what he consciously believes about what Telford did to him. “Is it all right?” Obviously if the thought of it happening to her horrifies him so profoundly that he can’t bear to be in the dream, it’s _not_ all right. But I’m not sure he quite puts the pieces together.

A very important bit of dream here, in the Wyoming landscape that will come back later. (I chose this landscape because I drove through it a couple of times going from Texas to Montana, and found it phenomenally beautiful.) And we learn a bit about Young here: that he's from rural Wyoming, and that he was never quite comfortable in the atmosphere of the Mountain. The choice of the song ("Great High Mountain") seemed appropriate to me in terms of what Rush is attempting. There's a question of what the mountain is; the obvious interpretation is that it's the mission of saving the crew and ascending, but it's also, of course, being loved and learning to live.

Rush’s next nightmare is about being broken, and about being “corrupted,” a word that comes up several times: his data is corrupted, after what Telford did to him, but he's also morally corrupted (either because of what he did to Gloria, or because of that older, persistent sense of guilt and wrongness). Significantly, Young is Telford here: saying what Telford said in the laboratory. So subconsciously Rush has some uneasiness about Young, and whether he can trust Young not to do to him what Telford did; whether Young is going to fit into a pattern of Telfords (see chapter 26). But then the real Young shows up to rescue him and take him to the cozy little tent where Rush can feel safe and rest.

—Which Rush can’t stand. Rush is terrified of the potential for comfort and tenderness. So he slips away. (And we get a hint here about the ship supplementing his energy.)

 

**Chapter Sixteen**

The sound of Destiny’s shields is something I based on the sound of the aurora borealis (when converted to sounds humans can hear), which seemed like it would be fairly similar.

The action-y bits tend to come from the original story, because I was too lazy to change them. I just lightly edited them.

The busted air recirculator at the wrong pitch! Oh how that idea made me laugh when I thought of it. Rush would _hate_ it. (A concert A is 440 Hz, and Rush has perfect pitch.)

There’s a Biblical allusion in here: “where the circuits and crystals and wiring and registers seemed to clap their hands.” Anyone who’s a Sufjan Stevens fan probably got this. There are actually several Biblical allusions throughout this story— there's another one that I forget the location of, about the ship having known Rush before he was born.

First appearance of the Rush-as-ice simile, which I liked a lot, and which ultimately gets turned back around on Young by Chloe towards the end. 

Annnnnd: first explicit appearance of Rush as threads! Though it’s still pretty vague, because Young isn’t part-Rush yet.

Some ghosts aboard the seed ship, or references to ghosts, an image/idea that later becomes quite important. I like Rush’s discomfort with the seed ship because of its inability to recognize him. There’s something interesting in there about what it means to be a person, i.e. that one has to be  _recognized_ by other beings. Here, the fact that the ship doesn't recognize or address Rush is very disturbing to him. 

You’ll notice that Rush’s response to panic is to tell other people not to panic.

I think I reference cockroaches/water bugs when trying to describe the Nakai because my one real phobia is of cockroaches. Coming from Texas, where we have cockroaches the size of your thumb, I’ve had several formatively horrifying cockroach experiences: One crawled up my leg once; one dropped onto my computer keyboard when I was a teenager; and then when I was 19 I lived in a cockroach-infested apartment where I would set out poison and come out of my bedroom in the morning to find like eight dead cockroaches on the floor. Now if I see one I have to douse everything in poison and flee.

At the very end here we get a glimpse of the level of Rush’s distress about Young, which hints at how attached he is already.

 

**Chapter Seventeen**

Young’s experience regaining consciousness is based on my experience regaining consciousness after getting hit by a car.

What Rush says is _really_ rude if you follow the etymology of _conneritom_.

Ooh, the first appearance of Rush/AI. Most of the conversation here is drawn from the original, but I wanted there to be an intense and somewhat erotic moment between them at the end. IMHO, this experience in the shuttle is the point at which Rush really realizes that he’s developing feelings for Young, and Young starts to _experience_ feelings for Rush without realizing it. 

When Young tries to pull Rush out of Destiny here, he sees, without understanding it, that Rush has merged with the AI. He experiences Rush as being more ship-like, and confused about whether he’s the ship or not, and who he’s supposed to be.

I love this whole section of Young experiencing Destiny. You have no idea how long it took me to come up with all this Ancient code, every line of which, by the way, _makes sense as code_ , even though I was aware that no one was going to notice or care about this except for me. The bit in bold at the end (“nectos abmithetor”) is “connection lost,” which is when Rush pulls himself free of Destiny using Young.

Then the formatting becomes very important in understanding what’s happening, as I will tend to do more and more in the future. The far left is what Rush is saying. “Someone” is of course Rush, and we get the specific signifiers of Rush’s fear: broken glass (the radio being thrown through the window), blood-in-mouth taste (getting beaten up in the streets of Glasgow), water choking (self-explanatory). If you read carefully, there’s a resonance here between “someone was scared” and the later “the shuttle is scared” in The Two-Body Problem Part 1. 

All of Young’s thoughts actually make sense: he was thinking about Rush’s _mental_ weather, but he free-associates to actual weather in New Mexico, but the weather in New Mexico turns into a meditation on the nature of being hurt and recovering. This is clearly relevant to Rush, but perhaps also relevant to Young himself. I find these meditations very beautiful, actually, on re-reading.

Rush is so scared and so gentle here. This is the first time he realizes that he cares about Young.

 

**Chapter Eighteen**

I made myself laugh so much with the idea of Rush as the Energizer Bunny. 

There’s a very subtle signal here of what’s happened with Young’s mind— he goes from referring to Destiny as _the_ Destiny to referring to it as just Destiny, which he’s already characterized as something that Rush and those close to Rush do. Telford picks up on this much later.

I did some insta-research on military weapons for the scene when they reach the armory; that was the first point at which I became aware that I was writing a period piece, insofar as this is set in 2011, and quite a lot has changed since then. (This becomes especially relevant later on with DADT, and then when the crew returns to Earth.) 

I also made myself laugh with “The inside of your head is exactly what I imagined it would be like.” 

And then we get another scene of RushandYoung! I loved the technical challenge of writing this voice. Again, you can see different elements of Rush and Young emerging at different points here— the reference to basic training, the feeling that Chloe understands, and then a hint of dissonance with “that was tactically good because an emerging situation was not a useful site for emotions and to be honest they often struggled with this because sometimes an emerging situation was a useful site for emotions when emotions were the only fuel you had to burn and it was an explosive fuel but it was what they had in their body,” where you can see them wrestling with themselves a little. And then Young’s knowledge of the weapons combined with Rush’s lack of training, and Rush’s violent reaction to the Nakai combined with Young’s “goddammit they were going to do this.”

Poor Cédric Villani. His book was enormously helpful for me, but he’s so faintly ridiculous that I can’t imagine Rush not viewing him with total disdain. So I threw in a swipe at him here in Rush’s memories. Then we get a little snipped of Rush and Gloria at odds about family; I have a very clear sense that Rush would have felt that Gloria’s posh family disliked him, and we learn a bit more about this later on through another flashback. 

The last left-hand section is complicated to parse. They can’t stand being hurt because if the Nakai was just hurting one of them they could bear it, but each of them can’t bear it that the other is being hurt. Again, we're starting to see here that they've started to care about one another.

I like the way I described Destiny’s interactions with RushandYoung here. I don’t have anything to say about it; I just like it.

Then we have possessed!Chloe trying to kill Rush, and what I think is a really nice scene between them, where Rush is very gentle and funny with her, and we see again that she’s probably the only person he openly cares for.

But then we immediately see that he _secretly_ cares for Young; there’s the moment of eye contact between them that lasts, and the fragile, apprehensive thing that Rush is feeling.

“What kind of fucking question is that, can I walk”— we see that Young is getting skilled at seeing through Rush’s bullshit.

At the end of this chapter, without Young consciously realizing it, he’s begun to see Rush as unravelling threads. 

 

**Chapter Nineteen**

We start with a Rush who’s really scared, as Young identifies, and as Greer rightly pins to Rush being worried about Young. When Rush says that “nothing happened. Nothing that changes anything,” I think he’s talking both about having to rebuild Young’s mind and about the related revelation that he’s not just going to be able to ditch Young— that he’s developing feelings.

We see another instance here of Young having figured out the best tactic for dealing with Rush— he defuses Rush’s emotions with humor, here with the code, which made me laugh so much when I thought of it. And it’s followed up by a tacit admission that they do care for each other, which characteristically is communicated through denial of that fact.

Of course, Young then fucks it up by thinking about TJ, and how if he made her laugh he could prove [that he’s straight, really]. And Rush is unhappy because he’s starting to be jealous of TJ, and Young plays the Telford card and accuses Rush of not caring and basically says every one of the worst things to say to Rush, causing Rush to flip out.

The paragraph of Rush melting down is small but dense. We get the key Rush images of trauma packed in there, and a very telling line about how love means eating away or being eaten away at, letting yourself be devoured, which is significant glimpse at Rush’s basic model of or fears about love.

There’s a brief bit of foreshadowing with Young feeling like someone had taken off half his body without Rush there

Then we get the first hint of one of the major changes I made to the plot of the original story, which was to substitute Chloe for almost every part that Eli plays. There were several reasons for this, many of them which come into play in this first scene: first of all, I’m simply not interested in Eli (white straight nerd who plays video games and is basically a Marty Sue), and I’m extremely interested in Chloe (a sort of monster girl who's having to reevaluate her life). Second, however, Chloe is a much more natural and important fit for the central narrative. She, like Rush and later Young, is struggling with issues of transformation, personhood, and how to relate to other people when you’re not sure who you are anymore. Some elements of her relationship with Matt echo Rush’s relationship with Young: a strange and traumatized genius who falls in love with the surety, stability, and honesty of a seemingly simpler person.

Here, I felt that Chloe could say something to Young that would be both relevant and truthful. This is the first real glimpse we get of her struggle: that she feels isolated, and different, and worries about her relationship with Matt. This is part of the very small undercurrent in the story about the isolation of genius, or of having a mind that works in a very different way.

In Young’s apology-conversation with Rush, we get the hint that Young feels he’s on the edge of some important abyss, and of course we know what that abyss is, though Young doesn’t. And Young defuses Rush with humor again.

The party: I made up new Destiny Bingo entries, though the game itself comes from the original story. I’m endlessly entertained by the idea of Brody being this kind of stoner, and Volker being kind of a square. (We learn more about Volker later.) I amused myself a lot with their pizza conversation, and with how easily they bait Rush by insulting Scotland.

Would Young really recognize the passive voice? I don’t know. But it was very funny in that clip.

The fish/fisherman question about baiting comes back, of course. It appealed to me a lot. It was a wonderful way of doing some very guarded, tentative flirting here, which they're both perhaps quasi-aware of.

I love Young’s insight into Chloe on the dance floor. Chloe works very hard to be human. 

The idea of the AI saying, “You do not know me. You do not know my scene” amused me a huge amount. I love writing the AI, because it’s quite child-like yet sophisticated, which is probably my ideal voice to write. 

There’s a suggestion here that one of the reasons Rush has quit sleeping is that he doesn’t want to end up in Young’s dreams or wake up with Young holding him— presumably, based on what we saw in his interlude, because he craves it and fears becoming attached to it (only to be abandoned).

There’s a very important quote from the AI here:

“You also wish to control him, because you do not wish him to be hurt. Yet the very act of control alters the object of your protection, and you find you have damaged him, although this was what you intended to prevent. The equation that allows for maximal protection while preserving the preponderance of his selfhood is a complex one. There are many variables involved. Perhaps your algorithms are better suited than mine to solve it.”

Not only is there a question here about protection as a form of control (which, of course, is what Rush is afraid of, and what makes Young potentially like Telford), but there’s also a question of what the self is and what it means to protect the self. We see here that the AI is very concerned about protecting Rush while also not “damaging” him— while preserving the preponderance of his selfhood— though it’s not clear that Young understands this. 

We’ve already seen that Gloria was good at puns. As I said a while back, I like dropping these hints about who Gloria was and why she’s missed so much.

I love the AI gradually trying to understand human interaction. And we get another very subtle hint at Young’s complicated feelings about Sheppard. All right, a not-so-subtle hint: “Perhaps you are trying to tell yourself something.”

And now we get the encounter that really clarifies and establishes a lot about Rush and the ship, which is Young coaxing Rush out of the ship. Young describes it as a seduction, which hints at the way in which Young will ultimately seduce Rush away not only from the ship, but back into wanting to be a person on a larger scale.

Young also acknowledges here that he’s touching Rush because he wants to, and lets himself think about Rush’s body. That’s an idea that will recur: how Young is always a little bit afraid of letting himself think of Rush as a body, because doing so would mean admitting that he’s attracted to Rush’s body.

And we get the threads here: Young’s first real sense of talking to Rush as made up of threads. The threads are always a little bit child-like or animal-like, and they always like and want Young; they’re a more honest level of Rush, without deception. And the exchange that occurs here— the idea that it doesn’t have to hurt— is really the underlying theme of much of the story, and the message that Young will try to hammer home for Rush over and over again.

There’s a running pattern of Young and Rush saying hello to each other in these odd, exposed moments. I foregrounded these because they reminded me of a lot of philosophical stuff that has to do with recognizing the Other as a person; these exchanges felt to me like moments of recognition that were important.

 

**Chapter Twenty**

We start out with some awkward, not-wanting-to-acknowledge-attraction back-and-forth between Rush and Young, which is sort of an early version of the “Sola causa est” stuff about Young being warm that’ll come later. 

And then there’s a big question of where Rush is going to sleep, because he no longer has the excuse of them not being able to separate. He pretty clearly wants to sleep in Young’s bed, but can’t find a way to admit this that doesn’t expose him in a way that he finds unacceptable.

The frog and the scorpion: this comes back, of course, in a pretty devastating way at the climax of the story, and I was already thinking of that when I put it in here. _Of course_ Telford would tell Rush that he's a scorpion; it’s completely consistent with everything else Telford says. And I liked the potential for alternate readings here: Rush, convinced that he’s a scorpion, doesn’t _want_ to risk trying to change and potentially hurting Young, but Young is trying to tell Rush that there is more of life to explore. (I mean, really both of them, throughout the story, are trying to show each other that there is more potential in life than what they’ve allowed themselves.)

Young does a nice job of managing Rush here, getting that Rush doesn’t want to have to say that he wants to sleep in Young’s bed. 

FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE CABIN!!! This was _not_ something I knew what I was going to do with when I stuck it in here; I had no notion that it would become as absolutely central to my concept of their relationship as it did. And this is one of only two times, I think, that we see it through Rush’s voice rather than Young’s— which now bothers me (again, as with the dreams, because I think it makes the rules unclear), but I like the writing so much that I refuse to go back and change it. I have some handwave-y explanations for why it happens this way that have to do with how distressed Rush is and the fact that Young doesn’t reallyknow what he’s doing here. Anyway, I loved the idea of this being the absolute most un-Rush-like place that Young could possible drag him into: a Western-themed cabin in New Mexico.

I don’t think people from Wyoming really say “gullywasher;” it’s a Texas dialect word that I picked up from my dad, who’s extremely Texan. But I found the notion of Rush’s reaction to it hilarious.

In terms of the mechanics of what’s happening here: basically, this is exactly what Young has gotten used to doing in his dreams, but he now has all these extra capabilities from having Rush’s mental architecture, so he does this mental relocation on instinct without really knowing he can.

Rush going into Young’s head here preserves Young’s notion of his consciousness as literal architecture, which is always how he sees it, and also shows us how fond Young is becoming of Rush.

In the original story, Young massages Rush’s back to get him to go to sleep, but I made it more physical and intimate here, in keeping with the idea that they’ve really become accustomed to touching one another. And they’re already sleeping curled together, without thinking about it too much. Still, I kind of wish I had done something different here— refigured the scene more drastically.

More daily life of the SGC in Young’s dream, and another glimpse of his friendship with Sheppard, along with Sheppard’s futile attempts to bring Young to self-awareness about his sexuality. I was really proud of what Sheppard says here, about wearing the suit, because I think he’s describing exactly the process that Young’s been going through: trying to tailor the suit to hide things that don’t fit, feeling terrible wrong-shaped and self-conscious. A lot of Young’s journey has to do with the decision to not wear the suit. 

In the dream, we find out that Rush has been trying very hard not to show up in Young’s dreams, and that now he’s maybe a little afraid to because of what happened to Young’s mind. And there’s the bleak foreshadowing of Young telling Rush to keep breathing, and Rush saying that he can’t.

I went back after the fact and made some edits to the meetings with O'Neill and Carter, which earlier had been much more identical to the original story, apart from the fact that I have Telford realizing belatedly that his experiment with Rush worked, and that Rush is connected to the ship.

I had the impulse for Rush to be a bit more preening and show-off-y with his ship skills, so I have him play an oboe sonata in the room. The William Alwyn oboe sonata actually starts out quite beautifully, but then gets generic. Alwyn was a film composer. So Rush's comment about Carter's taste is meant to be insulting

With Carter, there’s an implication that Rush is deliberately flirting with Carter to make Young jealous. There's also perhaps a slight double entendre later, in a bit I added after the fact— Rush saying that he appreciates the aesthetics of a well-constructed gun. The bit about the well-tailored uniform is also a needle about Telford.

 

**21\. The Axiom of Choice**

The first Chloe interlude! In the original story, Eli is the one who helps Rush with his secret project. But I knew I wanted it to be Chloe, and I knew I wanted her to have a series of interludes throughout the story.

On the show, Chloe basically just has all this magical math knowledge left in her head after her alien transformation is fixed, but of course that makes no sense at all. As with Young’s knowledge of math, the ability to solve math problems has to do with the way that one puts ideas together, and the speed at which one can put ideas together. I wanted to explore the idea that Chloe is essentially a genius now— that her way of thinking has changed. Of course, at the same time, she’s also traumatized (by torture, and by the bodily violation of being changed— which, again, has some overtones of rape to it, though much less than with what happened to Rush), and those two things— the genius-ness and the trauma— are inextricably tied together. 

Here we really start to see the set-up for how Chloe’s arc is going to be a part of the story’s overarching thematic exploration of what it means to be a self. Her panic and fear come from a sense that she’s not sure who she is, and she’s not sure who she was supposed to be, and she's not sure what the relationship between those two Chloes is. 

The relationship between Rush and Chloe is one that I had to essentially invent from scratch, and it’s one that’s very important to me. It’s a close, intimate, meaningful, platonic relationship between a man and a woman, which is rare; there’s never any question of sexual tension between them, yet they’re profoundly important to each other and are able to share things with each other that they can’t with anyone else. It’s more-or-less a father-daughter relationship, but not quite; in some ways they’re friends, as Chloe says. It’s difficult to define or categorize, because it doesn’t fit into our expectations about what relationships between men and women can be. 

Chloe’s opinions about Eli are my own: I could never quite accept Eli as a genius; he strikes me as someone who is very good at fulfilling all the expectations of “smart guy” and very good at being likable. He’s a normative genius. Chloe is the opposite of that, not least because she’s a woman. It made sense to me that Chloe would feel perhaps a little bit of resentment towards Eli, who is so well-liked and never struggles with the things that Chloe struggles with.

It made sense to me that Rush would come to Chloe with this proposition. He knows that she’s extremely loyal to him, but he _does_ know, also, that she’d understand. So Chloe’s right to feel a bit manipulated by Rush, but also right to trust what he’s saying to her.

Really a lot of the things that Chloe says are my own views.

The word “corrupted” comes up again here. We know that’s a fear of Rush’s. That _he’s_ corrupted, both as “data” and morally. And frequently Rush seems to view Chloe as a version of himself that he can save and protect.

The idea of “moving” comes up here, and that will be increasingly important, and tied into various themes of the story. The importance of moving forwards.

I wanted Chloe to do ordinary things. Because she _would_ do ordinary things, and because often with female characters one’s not allowed to do or like ordinary things if one is supposed to be an extraordinary person. I also really wanted to not have Chloe be a Mary Sue in this story. (I know there’s this whole reclaim-the-Mary-Sue movement, but for me the Mary Sue and her male counterpart are very specific types of characters who are badly written and unlikeable.) She’s a specific, struggling character, and I wanted to start portraying that life at the end here.

I still really love this interlude.

 

**Chapter Twenty-Two**

A bit of a time jump, with some context to tell us that Rush and Young have basically started living together at this point, without either of them apparently addressing the issue.

Of course, we immediately find out that Rush has been implicitly lying to Young. I conceived of this as one of a series of escalating betrayals throughout the story, each of which makes Young more primed to believe that Rush is capable of deceiving him on an intimate level. 

Even though Young is furious at Rush here, his instinct is still to worry about Rush when Eli references Anubis’s lab, which of course is where Telford drowned Rush.

Young feels _really_ betrayed not because of what Rush is doing, but because he thinks that Rush’s intimacy is a lie, that Rush has faked it, and that Young is stupid for having bought the act. So this is really all a preview of what happens in Chapter 45.

I loved creating Rush’s shattered thoughts, which are a bit like poems and a bit like puzzles. Quite frequently they have the doctor’s memories in them— there’s a line here that we’ll get later: “Is your daughter in the city?” There’s also a snippet of dialogue that is implicitly about convincing Rush to do Telford’s experiment. Another snippet of Gloria and Rush, and then a story from Rush’s childhood that reveals a _lot_ about his modus operandi: “You and I both know that you are about to cause me significant pain and I wish to cordially inform you that you are mistaken if you think that you are the one in control of this” kind of sums up the way Rush approaches situations.

(There’s also a line in there about thinking of ice.)

An important confrontation between Young and the AI here: Young accuses the AI of not having a heart, and the AI doesn’t understand why Young would not want to spare Rush pain.

Young is probably right about Rush’s skills here, and we also get the deployment of please-as-the-magic-word, which is something Rush learned during the time loops, the “twenty-sixth one” that gets Young to do what Rush wants. Then Rush deploys it again on the bridge, less consciously, when he’s trying to get Young to let him go sit in the chair. 

And then we have Young and the AI/Rush combination. I liked the idea of this Rush trying to apologize to Young indirectly through offering him gifts. And then he apologizes explicitly, which is very un-Rush-like; as will happen later, he’s very unhappy about Young’s feeling of betrayal, but can’t change it.

Young actually does a fair job of outlining what he ends up achieving: he _does_ convince Rush to fight for his own right to exist in the world. But he can’t do that _for_ Rush. Rush has to do it for himself.

 

**Chapter Twenty-Three**

I’ll jump down to Young realizing that Rush has colonized his mental landscape, which of course has to do with Rush having put his own mental architecture in Young’s brain, but also hints at the way that the two will intertwine and come to share domestic space.

Another fractured Rush poem, this one with a bit of Xenophon, which I threw in because I like it and it seemed appropriate to Rush— it’s the story of the remnants of the Ten Thousand trying to get back to Greece, and coming to the shores of the Black Sea and realizing that they were actually going to make it home. There are also some lines in here that are revealing about Rush: “It was good and he never told Everett/ he’s sorry that he didn’t say it he should have.”

And then he get confused Rush, who’s a little bit adorable as he stares at his jacket sleeves, but less so when we realize that he’s remembering Ancient stuff.

I love the line about “Doesn’t entropy worry you?” This is the first time we see Rush having a problem with thermoregulation, which is one of my innovations. It sort of made sense to me that this would be part of the bodily transformation he was undergoing, and that it would be enormously difficult to control, and of course it provides a lot of opportunity for both cuddling and for drama, as Rush can claim that he only lets Young touch him because of that.

“Can you define the parameters of me?” is an important question, much more so than Young realizes. 

Young realizes, accurately, that in some sense it’s too late, that something has happened between him and Rush that can’t be undone. There’s a moment of exposure, honesty, and tenderness here, when they’re touching each other, that Young is terribly frightened of (for a change).

A classic Rush “I’m not a child/So don’t treat me like a fucking child!” here, and some jealousy of TJ, and then a complete meltdown that really stems from Rush's terror at the idea of caring and being cared for. Rush's insistence that he doesn't need anyone means, of course, the opposite: he's saying it because he's trying to make it true. He can't bear the idea that he's dependent on these people who could abandon him— who could devastate him by abandoning him. And by "people" I mean "Young."

The Greer/Rush dynamic is in full force here. And even Greer recognizes that Young is Rush’s, even if Rush won’t admit it.

And… the "efficiency, heat/that’s the only reason" line that will come back so often later. Both of them realize that this is not really the case.

 

**Chapter Twenty-Four**

There's something to what Young thinks about the AI's failure to understand the human (or material, really) experience— because it  _doesn't_ have material experiences. It doesn't have a body, so it doesn't really comprehend how a body can hurt.

I love the AI’s speech about “What is so great about being human?” When I was writing it, I felt like I was trying to be Shakespearean. It’s right; there’s a common thread to assign ontological primacy to things that can suffer, and Young is guilty of that. I think the AI is a bit uncertain of its own personhood, or fearful that it isn’t a person, and in trying to express its suffering, perhaps it’s trying to figure out this issue for itself. 

Young is right about Rush having a tendency to saw his own foot off, of course. And while he’s not right about the AI, his description of it as a “fucking ghost” is important enough to haunt (…) the rest of the story. 

I needed the AI to be threatening here, but it’s also very childish and lovable in a lot of ways. So its threatening-ness needed to be related to its childishness. We know that it doesn’t particularly understand or feel compunctions about hurting people, which is a frightening idea.

When Rush wakes up, he’s experiencing this shift towards an Ancient, ascendable consciousness, in which he’s able to perceive the world not as objects, but just as structures of matter. 

Sleepy Rush is so much fun to write. He’s angry and adorable at the same time.

I love Rush baiting Young when he discovers that Young is jealous of Telford in a way that Young won’t realize for a while. Rush really does use everything as a weapon at this point, and he _is_ distracting Young from the talk of his feelings, but I think he’s also just enjoying this sliver of discovery. 

Some serious questions of agency get brought up here in a joking way— the line about Rush being ruled by committee, which I find hilarious, comes back in a much more serious context when Young talks to the 30%-Rush combination later. And, of course, there’s some foreshadowing here about Rush being a nuclear arsenal. 

Rush’s dream about the disobedient molecules still makes me laugh a lot, too.

With Scott, I wanted to use this chance to show that Young is concerned about what other people might think re: Rush living with him, and also that he’s struggling with the fact that their relationship really can’t be defined. Here, Young doesn’t want Scott to think that he’s gay. But I think he also isn’t completely sure that his relationship with Rush isn’t already edging into that area. So he just doesn’t know what to say. 

When Rush tells TJ that her helices have too many teeth, he’s commenting on the genetic mutation that causes her ALS.

From “I’ll get in bed with you later” onwards, there are lots of points here where it’s getting hard for Young to deny that there’s a sexual edge to what he feels for Rush. (Rush, of course, already knows this, and uses it to tease him in the showers, when Young gets distracted by Rush’s naked skin.

Wray slightly gets short shrift in this story, because she simply didn’t thematically fit into it in any way. She’s a very normal, stable person. I couldn’t do much with her aside from have her provide reassurance and solidarity for Young when he actually acknowledges that he’s gay.

In the three-way battle between Young, Rush, and the AI, there’s a lot of stuff happening in the margins. The line beginning “Opertes” is “Secrets, he said and he said If you tell me yours I’ll tell you mine.” There are some Telford quotes in here— expanding the boundaries of human consciousness, and “Tell me how much you want it,” and probably “did you see what happened…” which is also about Rush being required for the project. The quote from an Ancient version of Livy is about Mutius Scaevola (a story that also shows up in another fic of mine, “Unaccommodated Man”), who puts his own hand into the fire to demonstrate that men who desire glory count their bodies cheaply. What could be more Rush-like than that. The numbers and the “tenser said the tensor” refrain are, in _The Demolished Man_ , a jingle that’s used to keep telepaths out of your head.

The mention of Calais refers to the historical anecdote that when Queen Mary lost the disputed city of Calais to the French, she said that when she was dead and opened they would find “Calais” written on her heart. This is something that a clever British schoolchild would probably know, but definitely not an American one, so— another hint that bits of Rush are in Young’s brain.

Poor Young. Part of his characterization in this story is that he feels so much pressure to hold it together, because he feels he’s failed as a commander, and that he’s failed at everything, really, he’s supposed to be good at. But of course there’s no _way_ he can hold it together under these circumstances.

And he can’t even worry about whether Wray will think he’s gay; a small step in the right direction there, since it’s more important for him to feel what he feels for Rush.

 

**25\. Not a Robot, But a Ghost**

I love this interlude. I mentioned before that the AI is one of my favorite voices to write, or the most natural, and it’s because the AI’s mixture of childishness and sophistication allows it to say very complicated things in unexpected ways. So much of the central story is articulated here.

The question of whether or not the AI has a heart is one that points towards the issue of whether or not the AI has the right  _pieces_ (does a person have to be made up of certain pieces) and to whether or not the AI has the right  _feelings_ (does a person have to feel certain ways). What are the criteria for personhood? 

“Ghost is just an ontological descriptor…” is repeated by Rush later, and is an important idea; it comes out of hauntology, really.

This concept that both the AI and Rush believe themselves to be _less than_ , but each of them tries to convince the other that they are the entirety of what they are, is incredibly important. I’m very against the idea of less-than-ness in general; what are the AI and Rush less than? Rush isn’t a broken version of his former self. He’s something different, with a different set of potentials. And so is the AI.

The AI’s description of what a ghost is is also incredibly important: “A ghost should no longer be happening. But it does not stop happening.” This connects ghosts to trauma, which does the same thing, but I think I also complicate the issue a little bit later on— is a ghost a survivor? The notion of things that exceed their correct temporality comes up many times in the rest of the story. 

I was so happy with the idea of the gold star. I probably overused it later. But it seemed to me like exactly the sort of thing that the AI would say, trying to sound human but misunderstanding. As someone noted in the comments, the description of the star (intentionally) sounds a lot like Rush, which of course is an idea that comes back much later in the title of his final interlude, but the description of the star also perhaps gives a sense of the intensity of the AI’s feelings for Rush. 

And then the very, very important bit of the conversation in which Rush is answering the question of what the two of them are supposed to do about the people they love and can’t not hurt (respectively, Rush and Young), but is also _really_ answering the question of how the two of them are supposed to live in the world as traumatized people. “We keep— moving.” “We keep happening.” (Connecting them to ghosts, but in a more positive, affirmative way.) Again, this notion of motion as the essential positive act.

I liked the idea that the AI prefers to speak English because speaking English means it’s alive, not dead— and Ancient is a dead language.

And I like the faint hint of queerness in the idea that Rush and Young share a category, but it’s difficult to say what the category is, or whether it’s a category just for the two of them.

 

**Chapter Twenty-Six**

aka THE KISS CHAPTER.

I went back after the fact and rewrote the opening of this chapter to make it more distinctive. Of  _course_ Eli would want Mountain Dew, and of course Camile would want the accoutrements of civilized life. The conversation also allowed me to lead with the question of Young knowing Rush, which is how the chapter also concludes. Here, there's a question of what knowing Rush  _means_ : whether it means distrusting him, as Young half-jokes and as Rush seems to believe, or at least think Young should believe. 

The action here largely comes in bits of the original story. 

Oh, my God. The stuff happening inside Rush’s mind took so long to create, in a way that’s totally disproportionate to how much it actually matters. Let it be said only that it all makes sense in terms of starship control, and there is a logic behind all of it.

Young’s horror at the thought of Rush using him (Young) to hurt himself comes, I think, not only from Young’s growing attraction to and tenderness for Rush, but also from Young’s awareness of Rush’s tendency to seek out Telfords (as Young will shortly articulate). Young doesn’t want to be that. He doesn’t want to fall into that pattern. 

The basic idea of what happened to Young’s mind comes from the original story, as does some of the dialogue from the scene where Rush explains it to him. Of course, Rush isn’t telling the whole truth here, or maybe isn’t aware of how much of him is in Young. But they’re both going to find out soon!

There's a bit in the math scene with Young and Rush that's another example of Young trying to control the world through controlling language: he doesn't like Rush saying "When I'm Destiny;" he insists that Rush say "When I'm with Destiny." At some point much later, he jokes that he heard on the playground that if you say something three times, that makes it true. But he seems to have internalized that, in a way.

I loved coming up with Young’s outrageous reactions to Telford’s impending arrival. 

This conversation in the showers is really about Rush being frightened that Young _isn’t_ fitting into that pattern of Telfords (which is really an older pattern in his life)— that Young actively resists being put in that role, and that he might be offering Rush something stranger and more tender, which Rush is scared of. But in the end it’s not just that they can’t separate; it’s that they both want to be with each other, holding each other— they’re just not prepared to admit it outright.

More Sheppard, and more Sheppard playing Gay Mentor to Young, and Young who doesn’t want to ask the question (which is, in a way, a question about himself as much as about Sheppard), and who thinks that if he just doesn’t ask the question, then things won’t change. (There’s a running theme of Young being scared of change.)

For some reason I still laugh at the sentence about how the scene is so peaceful that of _course_ Rush shows up like a disaster.

Rush clues us in on a couple of things: he’s so subconsciously drawn to Young that he can’t stop himself from showing up in Young’s dreams, and he definitely knows Young’s gay: “Christ, the fucking Air Force did a number on you.”

At the end of this dream, what sends Rush back into his nightmare is the realization that he’s stuck more of himself in Young than he realized, and that’s why Young is dreaming about Atlantis.

Arrival of Telford, ready to spar with Rush: “not so broken after all,” immediately putting Rush in the role of object, and one that Telford has the authority to valuate. The cigarette exchange, we later learn, mirrors one that took place just after they slept together for the first time. Telford is really good at manipulating Rush; I think he’s very skillful at manipulating people in general; much better than Rush is, actually. He says all the right things in this conversation: drawing Rush’s attention to the idea that people are making decisions for him, which Rush of course can’t stand; suggesting that Young has Rush on a leash; slightly threatening Rush; touching him. 

Some of what goes on between Rush and Telford has to do with the fact that Telford perfectly fits into Rush’s emotional map of the world, and so activates patterns that have been inscribed into Rush since childhood. Telford acts the way Rush thinks people are supposed to act: offering conditional/transactional care, imposing control on him, treating him as an object. So that’s a dynamic that’s very comfortable for Rush, and a dynamic that’s therefore hard to resist. But Telford is also at the center of Rush’s most significant single trauma, and that also throws Rush’s emotional landscape into disarray (though he’d never admit it). This means that he’s really, really poorly-equipped to deal with Telford. 

Young is right that Rush sets people up to play roles— often roles that don’t benefit Rush, but that allow him to continue to act out that unhealthy dynamic. If Young is an aggressor, then Rush knows how to survive as the victim.

And that’s what Rush is doing in the corridor— trying to provoke Young into playing a role that Rush has defenses against. 

Young doesn’t go for it, of course; instead he more-or-less accurately identifies what’s going on— that Rush couches the maneuvers he’s driven to by psychological damage as scientific, and replicates the same self-destructive pattern over and over again.

What is Young going to do about it? he’s going to do the opposite of hitting Rush, which is to kiss him.

I’m _very_ proud of the writing in that kiss paragraph. It feels exactly as desperate as I wanted it too. They _want_ each other, and they've been working so hard not to.

Then we get the first idea of Young as having become a key that opens the inner part of Rush, a part that wants to be opened, and that’s an idea that repeats and takes on more importance throughout the story. I think the explanation that Young gives later for this idea is one that I agree with: it's not that Young is naturally the right shape to gain access to Rush's innermost secret heart, but rather that their interactions are gradually shaping them into people who are suited to each other. Partly it  _is_ a question of predisposition, because Rush needs someone stable and caring, and Young needs someone who can push him to go beyond the boundaries in which he imprisons himself. But they do a lot of growing to be able to unlock each other. They make each other into what they need, and allow themselves to be made out of a desire to be what the other person needs.

There’s a running theme of Young being able to heal Rush by reassuring Rush that he’s wanted, that he’s loved. But that’s also just the catalyst that allows Rush’s mind to grow. So what Young is doing isn’t really healing Rush so much as sparking growth and healing in Rush, which mirrors what he does on a larger scale. Young’s willingness to be there, and be intimate with Rush, and _want_ Rush gives Rush the energy and the desire to grow. 

The handing-over of the cigarettes has a couple of potential meanings: it’s a handing-over of something that Rush can potentially use to damage himself; it’s a renunciation of something Telford gave him; but once you learn the context of the original exchange, it’s also specifically a potential switching of (sexual? power? etc?) allegiances from Telford to Young.


	2. Chapters 27-50

**Chapter Twenty-Seven**

I didn’t want to write Young as consciously wrestling with his sexuality. This is another thing that’s so overdone in fic (often badly) that there’s almost no way to write it meaningfully or in a way that feels new. So I wrote him as almost unable to engage with those thoughts consciously. He finds it much easier to worry about Rush, or think about it as a Rush-issue rather than as a Young-issue. But there’s the very telling line that he feels he’s fucked because he’s looking at Rush and seeing “someone it was possible to kiss.” So a crucial transition has been made here: he is no longer safe in his ability to classify men (and specifically Rush) as people it’s not possible to kiss. He’s done it, and now he can’t use that boundary to safeguard himself.

“Glaiket” means, like, stupid.

Young’s conversation with Scott, TJ, and Greer takes place in the original story, but it’s something of an info-dump. I wanted to liven it up a little and make it about lots of different things. So there’s the crucial paragraph here where Young contemplates being linked to Rush, which he correctly identifies as something that’s changing him— but in his current mindset, he sees that as a kind of warping of who he’s _supposed_ to be. He even uses the language of the virus: changes that are propagating inside him just as physical changes are propagating inside Rush. 

Young is accurate in what he says to Greer, both about Rush and Greer’s understanding of Rush; we see this in Greer’s interlude later. Greer understands how past trauma can drive people to let other people do terrible things to them. In fact, Greer is probably more aware of this than Rush is.

A chunk of the next scene comes from the original story— I went back after the fact and rewrote it a bit, because I was still struggling with the question of why Young does what he does here, and I wanted to foreground that in some ways it was a reaction to the kiss. Young feels like a failure as a commander, and he feels the reason he's a failure is that he's not able set aside his personal feelings. So he sets out to prove he can do that here, but ultimately realizes this is the wrong choice.

When Young fights the AI, I wanted to give a sense of that happening. So I had the AI speak in binary code, and try to give a sense of Rush’s mind shutting down. This is probably Young’s most Telford-like moment— I even foreground that with the talk of what's "necessary"— which is why Rush is so nonchalant about it; to Rush, this is actually one of the more understandable and reassuringly familiar things Young does. He finds it logically defensible, and knows how to deal with it. He hates it, but he knows how to articulate that hate to Young. It’s Young’s horror that’s harder for him to understand—

—and then the “something in [Young’s] face” that threatens tenderness, which causes Rush to go on the offensive, because Rush is extremely threatened by being cared for.

What Rush thinks about Everest and the Death Zone is true, and seemed very applicable here. The Death Zone is the height past which stopping for any reason (even to rest, or to try to save others) will almost certainly result in your death. I'd just been reading a lot about people who'd died on Everest around the time I wrote this, I think because of some climbers who'd died on another peak in the Himalayas?

But they both want each other _so much_ that they can’t stop themselves; the word “almost-binge” here is a good description. 

It’s funny that Rush tries to convince Young of the artificiality of their attraction, because Rush of course is accepting of almost any other kind of change; he doesn’t see himself as becoming artificial. He just can’t accept that someone could love him. I think he perhaps believes that _Young’s_ feelings are artificial; he doesn’t think that his own are. But he feels he has to save Young from getting attached to him, which is why he attacks Young so savagely here.

And it’s a transparent attack: he’s obviously lashing out at Young’s weak spot. He knows that Young isn’t ready to admit his homosexuality yet, and that Young has a lot of internalized homophobia to deal with. Young can see what Rush is doing, but he can’t not be hurt by it and, as always, the fact that Rush is trying to manipulate him into a response makes him angrier. 

 

**Chapter Twenty-Eight**

One of the most interesting and challenging things in this chapter was writing Rush’s fragmented, virus-corrupted thoughts. Again, they’re a bit like a poem, or a sequence of poems. In the first section, we get an Ancient koan and a cryptic comment from Gloria that’s really a bit of a commentary on genius, and then there’s a dense little puzzle that I’m immensely proud of: the “what a piece of work”/“you are a piece of work” block, which plays with the different potential meanings and translations of the word “work” and “piece” (work as labor or artwork; piece as part or as artwork) and then the third meaning of work, the physics meaning, and there’s the sly truncated reference to “a magnitude of force applied over distance,” whence the original story takes its name.

In the “Young wasn’t even aware” paragraph, there’s the idea of Rush as a part of Young, and specifically as Young’s heart, combined with the returning image of Rush as a piece of ice that’s melting. The idea of Young and the AI trying to hold the water of Rush between them comes back in The Two-Body Problem: Part 1, where there’s a question of what exactly that water is.

This is the first point at which we really see a clear indication of how much Rush cares for Young. There’s something slightly unsettling about it— he _can’t handle_ strong emotion; he doesn’t know how to, or doesn’t have the tools, and it’s sort of like his heart is a switch that can only be in the off or on position. Here, when it’s on, it’s _on_ , and he can’t function at all. He’s completely irrational, and we see how dangerous it is for someone to be irrational and in control of the ship, because the doors try to stay open for him.

I struggled at first to write this next section, until I realized that it needed to be in Rush’s voice. Not only was it easier to convey what was happening to Rush like that, but it was going to be far, far more compelling as a piece of writing if we were seeing the situation through his eyes. So I had Young retreat into the background and watch through Rush. We get the free-associating strings of thought, which are meaningful but random (“flurry, you made snow in Oxford/ shower, fall, sparks fall, lightning flashes, in the blink of an eye” and so on). (There are also quite a few hints about the AI-doctor’s daughter woven in there— later, when we get to “child/“don’t treat me like I’m a,” the Ancient reads, “Did he have a daughter? It… yes/no/ she was in Atlantis and/ she had gray eyes and dark hair.”) We see right away that even Rush’s ordinary narration is unusually incoherent. And we get insight into Rush’s relationships with Telford and Chloe that we wouldn’t otherwise have.

I’m always kind of interested in the gender of the AI, which is fundamentally a genderless being; here, even after Rush corrects himself from “Gloria” to “Jackson” in thinking of it, he still refers to it as “her.” 

We see here how manipulative Telford is; I think he has a very clear understanding of _why_ Rush responds the way that Rush responds to certain tactics, and he doesn’t hesitate to take advantage of that. Interestingly, Telford’s right— Telford’s _often_ right. Often the things that he says are very intelligent and perceptive. It’s just that he has absolutely no interest in other people’s feelings, except insofar as they’re useful.

Part of what’s going on here is that Rush is absolutely overwhelmed with traumatic memories. He leans into Telford’s touch at the same time that he’s thinking about Telford pushing him under the water and calling him broken, which is the paradox of their relationship. Then, when Rush realizes that Telford has essentially _done it again_ , where “it” is “decided what needed to happen to Rush’s body without discussing it with Rush,” he starts to have a panic attack and can’t stop thinking about being pushed under the water. There’s no conscious recognition on his part that this is happening because of Telford, because he has no perspective on Telford. But it clearly is. The most telling line is probably “if he was sitting down it would be hard to run for instance if someone suddenly pushed him under the water,” which is presented straightforwardly, as though this is a completely rational thought to have, but of course is actually disordered thinking.

One of the interesting things about this scene to me is that everyone’s reaction has more to do with themselves than with Rush. Telford— well, that’s obvious. Greer is really insisting on Rush’s right to be fucked-up, or insisting that it’s okay for Rush to be fucked-up, because he sees himself as fucked-up. And Chloe explains her own reasoning: she is seeing herself in Rush. That’s why it’s so difficult to decide who’s right: probably Chloe is thinking of Rush the _most_ , but none of them is really objective.

In the original story, Eli convinces Rush to drug himself. That didn’t quite make sense to me. It made perfect sense to me that _Chloe_ would do so, because Chloe _does_ actually have a lot of experience with losing control of her mind and potentially being dangerous to the ship. And we’ve already seen that Rush has a high degree of trust in Chloe. Having her be the one to convince him to drug himself advanced her arc.

I fell in love with the line about Chloe’s tear hanging from her eyelashes “like gravity in its tiny quadrant had briefly stopped.” I quite often fall in love with my own sentences.

So there’s a very important discussion of selfhood here that brings in the questions of houses, or at least walls, again. Here, walls/boundaries/houses are _positive_ , because they’re the very definition of self: what separates you from everything else. To want to transgress boundaries is not to want to cease to exist as a self, or to want to lose all sense of one’s own self. So there _do_ need to be boundaries.

Even now Rush can’t articulate what he feels for Young; it becomes this material message that he tries to communicate to Chloe, something _of the body_ that she manages to understand. 

And yet he does articulate _something_ through the fact that he’s more concerned about Young; he doesn’t want _Young_ to be cold and scared. 

And we get the return of the song and the landscape from Young’s dream, and the idea that the AI knows that this would be the most comforting thing for Rush: something that Young offered to him to make him safe.

 

**Chapter Twenty-Nine**

The conversation between Young and Riley is largely drawn and edited from the original story. At the end, I have Riley help Young in concession to his “unusual state of existence,” which is slightly setting up the idea that Young and Rush have ceased to become strictly separate beings, and that the Ancients will eventually accept this reasoning and treat them as entwined.

Then we have Young turning himself into Rush. You can track the transition as he starts thinking about the four-color map theorem, as he adopts Rush’s narrative cadence (and then immediately makes a grim pun). We get a surprising amount of insight into Rush through Young, particularly in re: his relationship to pain, which is at least a sign that he’s _doing_ something. 

There are several physical tells that belong to Rush in this story, which are used to signal that Young or the AI are using his mannerisms; one of them is the clenching and unclenching of the fists; one is the hugging his arms across his chest; one is raking his hair back, one is hooking his arm over his shoulder. 

In the original story, Young sits in the interface chair and gets sent to someplace in Scotland. But I wanted the location to be specifically meaningful, and here it’s drawn from Rush’s last thoughts when he drugs himself: this is the most reassuring, comforting landscape he can imagine, because it’s where Young took him to get away from his nightmares. Rush sells it as being for Young, but in fact it's mostly for himself.

Another way I marked the personality confusions between Rush and Young at various points was the slippage between British English and American English. So here: biscuits/cookies. 

We have another reference to Young and Rush no longer being separate beings, when Riley says, “This is nice… but not yours. Although I suppose the term takes on a special meaning in this case.” It’s Young’s [memory], but that means it’s also sort of Rush’s.

Rush is setting up the unconventional attitude towards being that the story will gradually take, because when he talks about component pieces ceasing to be component or _starting_ to be, he’s actually talking about himself, Young, and the AI, who are starting to become various elements of the same being. 

We again get the idea here of Young’s mind as a house or a structure that Rush repairs. But because Young is being Rush right now, he can’t bear the scrutiny; this is how _Rush_ feels: that being known is like being skinned alive and taken apart. That becomes very relevant in a few chapters.

Young is so awful to the AI!Rush here, and the AI!Rush is so much more vulnerable than the other Rush that his awfulness feels even worse.

AI!Rush will later comment on Young’s tendency to police its pronouns, but really Young has a tendency to police _language_ , as though he can control reality by controlling what it’s called. The way he reacts to AI!Rush saying “I” is the same way he reacts to Rush saying “David.”

Young’s position in this argument is understandable when you consider what he says— that it’s really hard to trust Rush’s decision-making ability when Rush consistently behaves in such a self-destructive manner. But on the other hand, AI!Rush is right: _it’s his life._ At what point do you deny someone the right to make decisions about their life, especially when so much of their life has already been determined by other people imposing decisions on them? 

There’s already a hint here (in AI!Rush startling, but not in a pathological way) of my conception of what the AI does for Rush: it doesn’t erase trauma; it just gives him the resilience to cope with it and have healed from it. We see later that he’s still afraid of water, and he says that being held down doesn’t bother him _as much_ , and that he could learn to like it. So he’s not really doing what Young is afraid he’s doing, but Young doesn’t understand that. 

This is the second time that we see Young and [some version of] Rush have an argument and then ultimately not resolve it but still feel too tender towards each other not to comfort each other, which is a hint, maybe, at a fundamental healthiness that underlies all the fucked-up stuff they have to work through.

The “What the fuck are you sorry for/Everything” exchange is a recurring one.

Rush absolutely remembers every single one of the dreams he’s shared with Young, but even as only 30% of himself will not admit it.

 

**Chapter Thirty**

This is another chapter I struggled with writing until I made the beginning so heavily experimental. I wanted to represent Young’s experience and draw the reader into it. At various points throughout this whole story, I experiment with using spatial location or orientation to represent channels of input or levels of consciousness, and here the left-oriented parts are dialogue from other characters. I hoped that this would allow the reader to follow what was happening even as they were disorientated in the same way that Young was disorientated.

The “He was staring at the angles that the ceiling made” stanza makes me laugh, even though it’s only… _partly_ funny? So does “possible senior officer upchuckage” and “‘Nice work,’ Young choked out.” I have a tendency to make inappropriate things funny.

A lot of the rest of this chapter is drawn from the original story because it’s action.

There’s a paragraph that begins “The four of them wormed their way…” that’s largely original, and I’m very proud of it. Again, I was interested in the material reality of the experience, and it seemed like it would be a bit like being on board a sailing ship.

 

**31\. First Epithalamium for Augusta Ada Byron**

An “epithalamium” is a poem/song for a bride on her way to the marriage bed. Chloe isn’t engaged here, but the idea has already been discussed, so I thought I could get away with the title. I already knew, at this point, that the story was going to end at her wedding, which was not only going to be _her_ [straight, fairly heteronormative] wedding, but also the queer wedding of Rush and Young into a state of immaterial-and-material two-and-oneness. So the idea of the epithalamium was an important structuring one.

This is the second mention of the marble supertask, which comes back again and again, and which is an important coping tool for Chloe. It provides a framework here to talk about some of the problems she’s dealing with: she still has these moments of feeling alien or fearing that she’s alien, and her mother on Earth assumes that Chloe will be able to set aside everything that’s happened to her and resume old-Chloe’s life, which is very clearly not going to happen.

I liked the juxtaposition here of Chloe displaying what we would traditionally think of as “weak” and “feminine” attributes (crying, getting emotional) while also keeping count of the number of people she’s killed that day. 

We get these little flashback hints that something terrible has happened in the control interface room, seemingly to Rush, but I saved the revelation of what that is for later, so that the reader can experience it along with Young.

My version of Chloe is very hard on herself. She tends to think of herself as weak, stupid, acting like a little girl. And, I mean, when the show started, she really _was_ a child in a lot of ways. She’d graduated from college, but she had lived a very sheltered, privileged life. And a lot of her arc in this story has to do with confronting what it’s going to mean for her to grow up, given all of the things that have happened to her. The important question in this interlude is: “Is that what people who aren’t little girls do?” What I wanted to get at here is the idea that Chloe (as a female mathematical genius, as a trauma survivor, as a monster girl) has no models of adulthood to look to. We’ve seen that her mother is not at all the type of person who can help her make that transition. Rush is the one who can, but Rush is a man, and so different rules apply to him. In that sense, Chloe really has to struggle through this alone.

What she comes up with here as an idea of adulthood (and I _love_ my suggested conflation of adulthood and monstrosity) is essentially what Rush has offered to the AI as a model of survival after trauma: “[S]he can’t keep all the pieces of the world together. She can’t even keep all the pieces of herself together. But she can keep some pieces together.” 

There’s something very moving to me about Chloe clinging to the ship because Rush’s mind is in it. No one else seems to really think about the connection between the material ship and its mind/s. Chloe more readily accepts the idea of the ship as body, and doesn’t find it frightening or alien.

This conversation about marriage is so important. It really points towards the way that Chloe and Rush will come to embrace two very different solutions to their otherness, both of which are ultimately united and sanctioned by the double wedding. Chloe wants to be human. She wants to subvert normativity by asserting her right to the things that she feels excluded from. Rush rejects the notion of being human. He wants to escape normativity altogether. Philosophically, I come down on Rush’s side. But I think that Chloe’s insistence on the legitimacy of her own desires is powerful. 

 

**Chapter Thirty-Two**

This was a strange chapter to write because I never write action. Ever. I wasn’t quite sure how to do it. Action tends to be one-dimensional: you’re _describing_ what’s happening rather than creating meaning. What was in the original story wasn’t quite working for me; my style calls for short vivid moments, very concrete. So I ended up trying to render the action like that: the bright blasts from the energy weapons; Chloe creeping in small and looking like a shadow; Young’s hard fierce smile; the unmistakably human sound of pain.

And I wanted to bring back the idea that Young feels very insecure about his abilities as a commander, which is why we get the “I may not be a hell of a great leader…” line. 

There’s a slight Star Wars cadence that I couldn’t resist: “Volker and Brody better get that FTL drive online…”

I liked writing the little poem-flashbacks that Rush experiences, though I wonder if it’s really clear that the second one is from someone else’s perspective. Probably the first one shouldn’t have been from Rush’s perspective. (Again, I didn’t set up the rules clearly enough.) But it was a darling I couldn’t bring myself to kill. 

We get those same little short vivid moments in the taking of the CI room: the air painted white, figures looming out of the smoke, the thoughts of the Nakai like a flood of rats.

Telford is right; the argument between him and Young is absolutely about Rush. It’s about Young being angry at Telford for upsetting Rush, and jealous of Telford for having a history with Rush. And Telford’s right in pointing out that Young is fine with Rush being drugged if Chloe was the one who gave Rush the drug. This is what I mean about Telford usually being right, even though he’s also a nasty piece of work. (Some parts of the argument are from the original story, but the line about how Rush needed to chill out anyway is mine, because when given the option I always make Telford nastier.)

 

**Chapter Thirty-Three**

Actually, when given the option, I always make _everyone_ nastier. Which is why Eli reacts to torture in this chapter by being absolutely brutal not only to Young (as he is in the original story) but also to Chloe (as he isn’t). And also why TJ and Young have a fairly brutal argument. A note on their relationship: I really wanted to give a sense of why they might have been drawn to each other even though my version of Young is gay. That meant creating a TJ whom he could still love in some sense. I think I made her quite forceful— we find out later that she’s the one who made the first move— but also very caring (she made the first move because he was so upset about a team member’s death). They also have an intuitive understanding of each other, and an ability to use that to be tough but fair.

Chloe needed a chance to have a breakdown, and Young needed a chance to sort things out in his head, which is why they have this scene together. Sitting-there _is_ the hardest thing, sometimes, and that’s something that Young’s going to learn a lot about.

Going back to TJ and Young, TJ’s automatic “Because there’s nothing to scramble” to me suggests so much about their dynamic. It’s a kind of gentle, funny criticism that I think suits her, and the automatic nature of the comeback hints at how well they know each other.

And Young is so parental here with Chloe. She really ends up being his and Rush’s daughter, in that “a family can be a half-Ancient half-starship mathematician and an Air Force officer who are sort of the same person, and their genetically-altered math genius daughter” sense. “Chloe, I need you to stage a mutiny” is such a dad line. 

And going back to how I make everyone nastier… wow, Eli pointing out that Young was screwing TJ. He’s such a brat. I mean, to be fair, he’s pretty traumatized here. But I think… that kind of person is almost always more of a brat, or almost always has more brat potential, than gets shown on TV. 

The idea of Eli telling Young what happened in the hallway is in the original story, but I changed it up some here. I have this running gag about all of Eli’s numerical scales, which gets turned brutal here, as Eli almost brings up the thing that no one’s allowed to say. Of course Rush _would_ feel like _he_ was the one being abandoned, just as I think he experienced Gloria’s death as an abandonment. He so desperately needs people– he has such a black hole inside of him— that when they leave, he feels terribly abandoned, even as he also considers himself guilty of abandoning them. (That, in itself, is sort of the paradox of the abused child, often: you feel yourself to be responsible for your own neglect.)

I love the idea that Rush is the evil twin.

This scene between Young and the unconscious Rush felt so crucial, and I wanted to get the language of it exactly right. Because this is Young coming out to himself: making the admission for the first time. I think a lot of queer people, particularly growing up in extremely heteronormative cultures, as Young did, start out feeling like this: “This must just be how things are supposed to feel,” and/or “I don’t understand why everyone makes such a big deal out of sex and romance.” And then you open your heart to the Big Deal. 

Young also provides an early articulation of the big thing he’s going to teach Rush: to fight for life.

 

**34\. Six Syllables**

I preserved the basic idea of this interlude: that Greer is reading aloud to Rush from something that Telford assigned him as punishment— and that Young comes in and talks to Greer about what happened. But most of the substance is mine. For some reason it just settled on me that Greer would be reading the Book of Job, maybe because I already had a sense of the way I would turn it into a story about abuse (I discussed this with a rabbi: “What do you think of this reading of the Book of Job as being about God as abusive father?” him: “Hmm…”)

The NIV translation of Job that uses the term “slime pit” is priceless. It lets this whole discussion be faintly absurd while still being pretty brutally serious. Greer knows exactly what he’s talking about here. He’s been through the experience of going back to someone who’s going to punish you for reasons that you don’t understand and can’t defend yourself against. And what he says about having worn a track down to the slime pit is exactly what’s happened to Rush, really; that experience becomes familiar and predictable, and you accept it as the way that life is rather than struggling against it. In fact, everything _outside_ of that becomes threatening.

Greer’s account of what happened outside the gateroom is another account of Telford being right, but also awful: Telford _did_ have to stop Rush from keeping the doors open or going back to the gateroom, and he might even have had to slap Rush to get his attention, but he also does two of the things that Rush hates the most: he accuses Rush of acting like a child, and holds him down on the deck to restrain him. I think that Young is right when (I forget in what chapter) he says or thinks that Telford doesn’t want to hurt Rush, he just doesn’t even think of Rush as something that can be hurt. 

The word _dehumanization_ is really complicated here. Rush is, of course, literally being dehumanized by the ship: made something other than human. He is dehumanizing himself with the AI, turning himself into something _else_ that’s not human. But even though he will later claim to Young that he agrees with Telford’s assessment of himself as a machine, a part of the ship’s infrastructure, here I think we have a glimpse of a dissonant feeling. The fact that he’s essential to the ship means that he has to be preserved by Telford et al, regardless of his own desires. He’s being “saved” not because he is Rush, but because they need him to keep the ship running. And even though the more functional Rush maybe retreats into the idea that he’s a machine, Rush here is suffering because of that idea.

The “He would never forgive me… but he’d be alive,” which is in the original story, points towards the climax, in which this is exactly what Rush does to Young.

I’m very proud of my ambiguous pronouns in “you got to resist that shit. Cause you don’t deserve it. _He_ doesn’t deserve it.”

 

**Chapter Thirty-Five**

In the original story, the Telford & Young conversation is a bit of an info dump. I was really more interested in exploring Telford’s past relationship with Rush, and the difference between Young and Telford. So that’s what I did. 

Young tries his hand at playing Telford and Rush’s game here, threatening to tell the IOA all these details that— he’s right— really would come off as extremely unsavory, even if Telford was brainwashed at the time, and which homophobia would also cast in a poor light. 

This is a really unpleasant little conversation, from “Please tell me you’re not stooping that low,” the insinuations that Rush slept with Telford as part of a stratagem to get Destiny, to “Nick needs a firm hand.” And it’s a very successful conversation, from Telford’s perspective, because Young struggles with the suggestions planted here for quite a while. 

What’s most disturbing about Telford here is how casual he is about everything, even at moments when what he’s saying is very troubling. He only really falters once. But, again, he’s right about Rush lying to himself, and he’s right about Young and Rush not playing the same game. 

I _love_ the paragraph that begins “They were _not happy_ , those little parts of Rush.” This is the place that I feel like I most nailed what I was going for with the disassembled Rush. They’re so charming, those parts of Rush, and so _Rush_ -like, and Young’s interaction with them feels meaningful and true. 

When Young and Rush become a they, the “girl with the gray eyes” is the doctor’s daughter, as is the “girl with the dark hair,” while Gloria is the “girl with golden hair,” and Young is “the house they had rebuilt by hand.” 

This is the first appearance of Rush emitting electrical fields. This was another way of showing the progress of the virus in a way that seemed to make sense in terms of what ascension is supposed to actually involve.

Really I should have had Young _always_ pull Rush into the cabin when Rush has flashbacks— this is another case of the rules not being entirely clear. I wanted Young to subconsciously try to take him to places with pianos so that Rush could communicate, which is why they end up at O’Malley’s the first time. But that’s a bad idea, and I wish I could change it now. 

The right-hand-side (Rush) thought— “Next comes the glass box filled with water”— is one of those “seems like it’s about one thing, but is also about another thing” stanzas. It’s only partially about the Nakai.

A note on the phrase _iacte scorax_ : there really is no good Latin phrase equivalent to “fuck you” that I could find. I spent a great deal of time reading about ancient expletives, and the best phrase I could come up with was the Ancient Greek “go to the crows,” or “throw yourself to the crows,” which in Greek is “ball’ es korakas.” I came up with an Ancient version based on the Latin for “to throw” combined with the Greek “es korakas” and applied some elision.

A lot of Rush’s core philosophy is in the “plunging into the water” flashback: you defeat the strength that can’t be subsumed by submitting to it, even if it means your own destruction.

One of my trademarks as a writer is making things funny, even when they really shouldn’t be, and that comes out in full force here. A lot of this is very funny, even though it’s a terrible situation! “Genius, I don’t think you know how to play Charades” never fails to make me laugh. 

But it’s pretty brutal when Young accidentally says the absolute worst thing, inadvertently echoing Telford by telling Rush he’s acting like a child. 

There’s a running joke that absolutely no one will get, which is that Eli’s Ancient is actually not that great. His word order is dreadful. He often doesn’t remember that the verb is supposed to come last.

I thought a lot about how I was going to handle Rush speaking Ancient. When it comes to him interacting with people, it didn’t make sense to me that Ancient would be completely uninterpretable, as it has many cognates with English words. So I figured that people would understand parts of it, as TJ does with “werthom magicom,” which is pretty clearly “magic word.” Later, Young is able to guess from context that “Ne’emo deicevad ute Nick me nomenare potisseas” means something about him not being allowed to call Rush “Nick.” I also think that people pick up foreign words pretty quickly and easily, but not as much grammar (unless they have a lot of experience with foreign languages). So Young is able, later, to use some words he’s picked up, but he doesn’t know how tense or case work. 

_Vadedue_ is a word I created by taking the Italian word for “whatever,” “vabbe,” guessing at its etymology (it _has_ to come from va bene, right?) and then reconstructing the same shortening in Ancient: Vade duenos — > vadedue.

My version of Rush and Young’s encounter at the end of this chapter is very different from the encounter that they share in the original story, partly because by this point my Rush and my Young had really become very different characters. I thought very carefully about what I wanted to achieve here: I wanted Rush to be vulnerable, but I also wanted him to be clearly _Rush_ , albeit a shaken and psychically wounded Rush; it was also important to me that Rush and Young be able to communicate on some level, despite their lack of shared language.

Young has built up this encounter a lot in his mind— remember that he’s just _come out_ to an unconscious Rush, essentially, admitting that he feels like he’s falling for Rush— so it’s especially brutal for him when his attempts at even the most basic connection are so violently rebuffed. This is not what he imagined. And Rush feels he deserves to be left by Young; in fact, he’s driving Young away precisely because he feels he’s too broken for Young to see. But he also simply can’t bear for Young to go. He’s in so much pain, and he desperately needs Young with him.

Young is right that Rush is pushing buttons; the problem is, this is the only way that Rush knows how to get what he wants. It’s the only way he knows how to operate. He wants to be real with Young, but he doesn’t know how to do that anymore. 

I think that Young’s fear about Rush simply needing a warm body and a ticking noise is a legitimate one. But this is in part because he’s incapable of recognizing any kind of potential in himself that would interest Rush. He’s so used to thinking of himself as a failure.

The beginning of the dream is pretty clearly about Young’s coming-out.

I knew as soon as the dreams began to coalesce in my head that Rush wasn’t going to be able to talk while his mind was damaged, and that the dreams would become about him and Young learning to communicate (in part through the piano). The justification for Rush not being able to talk is that his self isn’t resolved enough to be someone who can speak.

The Albuquerque Isotopes are a real team.

Rush frowns at the piano because it’s _his_ piano— the one that he and Gloria owned.

I liked the idea of the piano providing a kind of game-like, teasing means of communication, while also allowing Rush to re-accustom himself to music. This is particularly significant because, of course, the reason he no longer plays the piano is Gloria’s death. So Young giving him his piano back and inviting him to play also allows Rush the opportunity to realize that he’s actually moved beyond Gloria’s death and is, perhaps, capable of having a relationship with Young. Both Young and Rush, in this story, have to move past their, well, pasts in order to enter into a relationship. Young has to move past heteronormativity, and Rush has to move past, among other things, grief.

I really liked this image of a very childish, vulnerable Rush determinedly marching out into the war zone that his own head has become.

 

**Chapter Thirty-Six**

I liked the idea of Camile providing a moment of affirmation for Young, and it seemed right that this would bring him almost to tears— allowing himself to admit (even if only _to_ himself) that he’s gay is a huge transition for him, and one that makes him feel very vulnerable. 

Telford is _very_ sinister in this scene, mostly because he’s trying to manipulate Young. He’s putting on a show— he doesn’t actually care about touching Rush; he cares about Young’s reaction to the idea that he might touch Rush. He’s very good at driving other people to emotional displays that he can then use to discredit them.

It seemed reasonable to me that someone would actually give Young a guide to Ancient that he could use to communicate with Rush, and Chloe seemed like the most considerate person, as well as the person whose guide would be funniest. I partly used the guide as a way of having pity on the audience, but her very pointed “Here is how to have a conversation” suggestions made me laugh a lot. 

—But not as much as the Telford vs. Rush Spy vs. Spy scenario that comes up in TJ and Young’s conversation. 

We see in the serious part of that conversation that Young still has a long way to go: his instinct is to deny to TJ that anything romantic is going on with Rush, even though it obviously is.

Very compelling arguments have been made that Jane Austen’s work _can_ be interpreted as being about the rise of capitalism and the production of the human being as commodity, but I also think that this line gives a sense of what Chloe was like as a college student— a little bit nerdy, very earnest, genuinely excited by ideas. She’s so proud of her little play on words later, too, with _quor_! 

We realize that the reason Rush is being so bitchy is that he heard TJ laughing, and he’s jealous of her. Of course, Young is very obtuse about this jealousy.

I don’t really have much to say about the kissing, though the logistics of it were something I struggled with a lot while writing: how to get Young to semi-consciously kiss Rush’s mind open without it seeming unforgivable, yet while also clearly understanding that he’s doing something he shouldn’t be doing. 

When Young interacts with the Rush-threads, there’s some very clear articulation of what it is that he’s providing for Rush: as Chloe said, he’s holding the walls up, providing a sense of shape and structure and boundary for the stuff of Rush’s self, while also feeding them the love and care and attention that Rush is starved for. These are the circumstances that allow Rush to heal from this trauma, which Young visualizes as literal growth.

There are two moments in the story when Rush makes admissions that I felt walked a very fine line between being vulnerable and being out of character. The moment when he admits that the cabin is a good dream is the first; the moment when he asks Young to send him there while he’s violently ill is the other. In both, I ultimately decided that Rush is so physically exhausted and ill that his defenses are down, which is why he makes these admissions. 

 

**37\. Careful, Not Too Bright**

In the original story, most of what’s in this interlude takes place, but the interlude is in Brody’s perspective. I didn’t want to draw peripheral characters into the story too much— I do with Volker, but that was logistically unavoidable for reasons I’ll discuss later. And I felt that I really needed a Matt interlude, because his relationship with Chloe is so central to the story. The difficulty is that he’s quite a nonexistent character, and I needed to build him into a character so that the reader would buy that Chloe loved him and accept him as important. 

I settled on the idea that Matt was someone who wanted to make himself better, which became his defining characteristic here: he’s willing to put in the work to get to the right places. What Chloe says about him is something I often feel: that it’s less important how quickly people think, especially if everyone thinks slower than you do, and more important that they work through problems to get to the right answers. I wanted to write that trait of Matt’s into the prose here: it’s very plain, but often makes important points. 

A sidebar about the Ancient language: one example of me just entertaining myself is that the past perfect is formed by reduplication, as with many Ancient Greek verbs. You can see that in action here, with hints of other linguistic change: _envevuenamos, entractractiand._

We get the first introduction here of the idea that Rush ought to be the one to give Chloe away at her wedding. I was already setting up the wedding as the climax of all of these relationships.

On the show, Matt is Catholic. I thought that he probably would have moved away from that specific church, but still viewed himself as very Christian. I see a lot of terrible depictions of religious characters’ reactions to homosexuality, and I wanted to write Matt as not _not_ having a problem with Rush and Young— because Matt doesn’t, like, have a sophisticated understanding of arguments about what Leviticus actually means, and he has a ingrained cultural reaction against homosexuality— but also write him responding to them primarily as people, and as people whom he sees experiencing a profound love. I think this openness to change is what Chloe loves in Matt.

The alloy here is transparently a foreshadowing of what Rush, Young, and the AI will become: a being made up of three people.

Rush is, of course, talking about himself when he talks about Chloe, and he hears Matt talking about him and Young when Matt talks about Chloe and himself. And after Rush leaves, Matt’s thoughts about himself as Chloe are meant to function as reflections on both their relationship and that of Rush and Young— which is particularly signaled by the returning simile of the house: the house as a future that Chloe demolished, so that Matt could build a new one that’s more expansive. This kind of opportunity is why it was so important for me to place Chloe close to the center of the story: her journey with Matt thematically echoes that of Rush and Young.

 

**Chapter Thirty-Eight**

In the original story, this chapter starts with Young talking to Eli and Brody, I think? But (a) I needed to know what had been happening between Rush and Young, especially as this is a crucial stage of their relationship, and (b) I could _not_ pass up the opportunity to show the meeting with Telford. Telford plays a much larger role in my story, and his first encounter with Rush post-virus seemed too important not to see.

To a certain extent, Rush’s casual endorsement of what Telford’s said about him being a piece of equipment/a gun is protective, a pre-emptive dehumanization. But to a certain extent, I think he does crave Telford’s praise, although he’d never admit it— precisely because Telford called him _broken_ , and because he was playing out this childhood dynamic with Telford wherein he attached himself to someone who would casually and inconsistently control/care for him, and found himself needing to “win” at that relationship without having intended to get so involved in it.

The discussion of begging between Telford and Rush is pretty brutal, but we see that Rush is a match for Telford: even after Telford drops what should be the game-ender of casually referencing Rush begging for his life as Telford drowned him, Rush comes back at him. But Rush’s “don’t touch me” and “I don’t _crawl_ ” are clearly explosions that happen because of what Telford says; Young makes a very subtle suggestion later, when Rush is sick, that Rush has gone into “don’t touch me” mode because of interacting with Telford. There’s probably some validity to that; my interpretation tends to be that Rush is partly overstimulated by touch and partly so starved for it that he experiences it as dangerous, and something he has to shield himself against. When he interacts with Telford, that _already_ puts him into a headspace where he experiences the whole world as full of threats and not to be trusted, so he has less energy or armor for ordinary things.

There’s another example here of Young very deftly defusing Rush with humor.

What Young says to Eli is really also about Rush; there’s a subtle suggestion of that with the image of the gun, which is what Telford called Rush. 

I wanted to pick a movie other than _Butch Cassidy_ , which is what was in the original story and is canonically a movie that both Rush and Young like, but I couldn’t think of anything else.

In the original story, TJ and Varro make Rush watch _Inception_. But I didn’t like that, and wanted Chloe there, and it amused me a lot that both Rush and Chloe would count cards. (This comes up again in the Gloria interlude.)

Rush is, of course, jealous of TJ precisely because she’s a very ordinary person, the human version of a white picket fence, very nice, with limited mathematical skills, and bad at poker. The one thing he will never be is ordinary, and while he isn’t usually at all envious of being ordinary, he feels that he can never be what Young needs— that he can only hurt Young.

In the original story, Young is angry that Rush can’t read English, but it seemed to me more likely that he’d be angry at Rush _hiding_ that Rush can’t read English (as obviously Rush would already know this). And then Rush’s violent reaction has to do with what he’s already feeling: that he makes more and more demands on Young, that he constantly hurts and exhausts Young and offers nothing in return. 

Here’s the other moment of real vulnerability from Rush, which he almost can’t bring himself to articulate: that he does view the cabin as someplace safe, the refuge that Young built it to be for both of them, and that when he’s at his lowest point, that’s what he wants. That’s where he wants to be.

Rush’s bad attitude in the cabin is a direct result of that vulnerability; he feels extremely naked and reacts poorly to that sensation. The music puzzle was, incidentally, “You help,” but of course Rush won’t now tell Young that.

It seemed to me that Young was most likely to have a book with him that was some sort of military history— my version of Young is something of a military history buff, mostly because it’s a socially acceptable outlet for his curiosity about how things work. I had read the William Manchester memoir as a teenager, and it occurred to me as a possibility; when I looked it up online, I found this passage right away, and it was perfect for foreshadowing what was about to happen with the ship’s buried memories and the Nakai malware girl. 

 

**Chapter Thirty-Nine**

This is, of course The Sex Chapter. It was always going to be a chapter about how they end up having sex. 

I added the confrontation with Telford at the beginning because Telford is such a significant part of this chapter, and of the coming arc— much moreso in my version of the story. This scene and the next are really about who’s going to have control of Rush, and if Young is going to be the new Telford, and whether Rush can get out from under people having control of him. I think the announcement about Chloe’s engagement works nicely with that, as it reminds him of this relationship that’s _not_ about control. He loves Chloe, and he can’t even really be happy for her, because he’s having to be an object that Young and Telford are playing tug-of-war with.

A good measure of how hurt/vulnerable/frightened Rush is in any given situation is how quickly and savagely he lashes out at Young’s weak spots, especially Young’s jealousy of Telford. Young tends to fight back with honesty, but here he traps himself into saying something that makes it seem like he’s been doing exactly the same thing as Telford: mingling sex and manipulation in a way that makes Rush believe he isn’t wanted as a person— only as an instrument. 

But Young puts himself out on a limb here (he uses pretty much the same phrase as he did in the infirmary, when he admitted that he was gay— “That’s what I’ve got,” as though he’s emptying himself of everything) and tries to articulate that he’s _not_ like Telford, and that what he feels for Rush has nothing to do with using Rush.

Young’s dream about the blanket is significant. Of course, Rush is always cold, and so what he needs more than anything else is a blanket. The blanket stands in for a lot of things that Rush needs. And Young is making _himself_ into what Rush needs, a process that is unfamiliar and painful. There’s also a fairy-tale quality to this, in terms of pricking the finger. What else is Young sewing into the blanket?

A long sequence of intense flirtation begins in the mess— it’s clear that both of them are conscious of Young having admitted that he wants to fuck Rush, and of the fact that somehow it’s all on the table now and they’ve got to decide what they’re going to do about it, one way or another.

The structure of the party (and the idea of Rush doing karaoke with Greer) comes from the original story, but I’ve added in some Telford confrontations. I knew already that I wanted to set the next up arc so that it was clear Telford had been talking to Rush about the Tok’ra memory device here, and so that there would be a real question of whether Rush had gone to Telford after he slept with Young. That doubt would become terrible for Young, because obviously having sex with Rush is an incredibly intimate experience for him, his first sexual experience with another man, and a moment when he feels that he’s really _gotten through_ to Rush. I wanted him to have to doubt whether any of that had been real, or just another game. So Telford had to be a threatening shadow throughout the night.

I picked the Pogues song because it seemed both appropriate and like something that both Rush and Greer would realistically enjoy.

There’s an idea, with Telford and Rush, that Rush’s lack of self-certainty (his fluidity of identity, his basic confusion over who he is, which— I don’t think I’ve touched on this before— for me comes from his need to be whatever he has to be in order to get what he wants from people, which is very much an effect of abuse/neglect) leads him to sort of submit to Telford telling him who he is. Telford’s insistence that he knows Rush is a comforting boundary-setting, but really a form of control. So Rush refusing Telford that power here is significant.

“The Ship Song” is perhaps a bit on the nose, but I couldn’t resist it.

Outside the mess, Rush is throwing whatever he can at Young to protect himself; trying to force Young into playing the role of aggressor/user, which is the role he’s more familiar and more comfortable with. Again, you can see that he’s frightened because he throws his relationship with Telford at Young in the line about “you military types.” And then his classic maneuver: inviting Young to do what he’s afraid is going to be done to him against his will, so that he can reassure himself that he wanted it.

I knew for a long time that Young was going to say, “Nick, let me take you to bed.” There was something very intimate, but at the same time oddly formal about it— it’s really an invitation not to sex but to a relationship, which is the opposite of what Rush had with Telford.

There were a few things I wanted to accomplish with this sex scene, aside from making it _good_ , which is tricky. I wanted it to be about Young’s discovery of a desire he didn’t know he was capable of; he’s pushed back into a state of adolescence by that desire, because he’s never really had the sex he wanted to have, and he’s having to learn all the things he ought to have learned then. The simplest things become erotic to him because he’s never allowed himself to experience them. There’s shame there, and there continues to be shame when he and Rush have sex much later, but there’s also relief. 

I have a tendency to not be able to resist humor. But I think I like having funny moments in sex scenes? Laughter during sex is really intimate; it’s a lowering of boundaries. And I like that Rush and Young laugh together here. 

The point of the last sex paragraph is closeness, and of course there’s a play on words with _close;_ they’re close in multiple ways, not least of all in that their consciousnesses are overlapping, which I like.

Rush not wanting to move is, of course, not [only] about not wanting to move from Young’s arms, but about not wanting to _change_ , not wanting to move forwards in time and lose this thing that he’s only just found. 

I think that last passage is really beautiful. Go me.

 

**White Picket Fence**

In some ways this is one of the more similar interludes to its original, which also has TJ observing the afterglow-softened Rush and Young and then having Rush ask for a timeline under the pretense of wanting to heal her. But I sort of thickened it with observations about the nature of wanting, and the nature of futures. That becomes quite pertinent, as this interlude really sets up the next arc, which is about those things. I should say that the next arc was the one I had planned in the most detail from the beginning; I knew that it would be about Young thinking Rush had slept with Telford, and Young questioning his entire path of self-discovery, and Young falling prey to this malware that really represents heteronormativity. So TJ’s commentary on Young’s relationship to heteronormativity is valuable.

Materiality Watch: there’s a lot of talk here about knowledge being in the body, and being communicated by the body even when it can’t be communicated in words. It’s true that the body has a harder time lying than the self does, and TJ describes real cases of somatic illness. I like the idea of the truth “Incubating,” which connects it to this idea of childbirth and potential futures.

“Someone spent a long time teaching him how dangerous it could be to reveal whether or not you care” is a very astute observation about Rush. And “Do you understand, she wants to say, that he’s not going back home to the house in the suburbs and the white picket fence? Do you get that it was never going to be that, once he figured out what that something-more was?” is an astute observation about Young. 

 

**Chapter Forty-One**

This is the chapter in which we first begin to get the AI as a character with its own history and its own trauma. I don’t really have much to say about its flashbacks or Rush’s flashbacks except that I’m very proud of them.

Rush works really hard to try and keep the peace with Young here, but at the same time there are clear signs that he’s already working with Telford, or that he’s at least already made plans with Telford. So there’s a question of what Rush thinks he’s going to accomplish— if he really thinks there’s any chance that he can salvage his relationship with Young when Young finds out.

Of course, Rush is _very_ aware that he’s torturing Young when he tortures himself, which is a large part of why he decides to use the Tok’ra device. But Rush can’t tell Young that; to him, allowing Young to know that Rush cares about him is like handing Young a weapon. In Rush’s experience, that kind of weapon gets used against him. 

Once again, when Young is in the control interface room, Rush works very hard to try to keep the peace with him, being very funny and charming. This arc is really the most fucked-up that Rush gets throughout the entire story, even though he gets more _anguished_  and more _destroyed_ in later arcs; this is the apex of him being completely self-destructive and really thrashing against his own psychological bonds. If you think about the two intersecting lines of life and ability that Rush and TJ discuss in the previous chapter, this is a place where Rush's previous destructive impulses and his growing (terrifying) feelings for Young intersect to create an explosive disaster. He wants a relationship with Young; he wants to _protect_ Young; he _cares_ about Young; but at the same time, he’s actively sabotaging that in ways that suggest he doesn’t really think _he_ deserves to be loved or protected, that suggest he doesn’t understand how to have a relationship with someone. He’s just… fucked-up.

 

**Chapter Forty-Two**

There’s a nice arc of change between AI!Rush saying “Material embodiment is such a chore” here and Rush having become, if anything, too attached to material embodiment by the end of the story.

I think AI!Rush is quite perceptive when he notes that he/Rush doesn’t really know what hurts anymore. That’s a major point of confusion for Rush, and it’s a problem for a lot of people who have been hurt over long periods of time. 

AI!Rush deftly pokes holes in some of the problems in the way we think about selfhood. And there’s a bit of an arc here between him outlining what Young can’t accept (that Rush can change and still be Rush) and Young outlining what’s largely the same point to General Landry towards the end of the story, in regards to Chloe.

The problem of the two Rushes is one that completely fascinates me. I’m essentially writing my dissertation about similar problems. Young is reasonable when he says that there can’t be two and both of them be “real”! That’s not how our framework of understanding selfhood works. And for Young to accept that both Rushes are Rush, he really has to throw over an entire way of thinking about the world, which he ends up doing only after undergoing world-overthrowing amounts of change himself, in which he becomes a different person.

There’s another example here of Telford being right: he’s the one, as is implied here and later confirmed, who told Rush that there’s no such thing as what you’re allowed to do, etc. And that’s a very good, transgressive message! And Rush is talking about Telford when he says that both of them had to fight for everything, which taught them that the rules don’t matter. So again: Telford actually has a lot of truth to offer. He’s just also awful as a person.

There’s the preview of a terrible idea here, which is that AI!Rush (like Rush) retreats to the cabin as the place that he feels most safe and most comforted, and Young therefore ends up tearing the cabin away from him as he tears him apart.

The beginning of the quantum physics lesson is drawn from the original story, but I used that as a jumping-off point for a longer conversation between Rush and Chloe. Rush articulates the human-ist idea (again using the word _corruption_ ) that there’s a real, “true” self written into us at birth, and we’re constantly trying to get back to that. The contrast between their lives is a good context in which to point out some of the problems with that idea. He had no privileges: an abusive family in a council estate, and a lot of setbacks later in his life. She had every privilege: money, a stable and loving family, excellent education. There are chances and wounds in life, and one can’t control those. One can only control how one lives with them.

And… then we get Young’s horrific experience of the ship flashback, and Rush’s consequent decision to do something very manipulative and unwise. There are a lot of warning signs embedded in the text here: Young floundering, the efficiency of Rush’s hands, Young’s extreme weariness. When Rush says, “No more horrifying things today,” it seems sweet, and it _is_ sweet, for a Rush value of sweet; he’s ensured that Young _won’t_ have to suffer through any more horrifying things that day. Unfortunately, he opted to do that in a way that’s not going to be acceptable to Young.

I questioned whether this would ask readers to take a step too far in terms of staying sympathetic to Rush. In the original story, it’s implied that he sort of seduces Young into kissing him and then makes Young really sleepy. But mine is a story that has sex in it. And, as I said, this is the apex of Rush’s fucked-up-ness. I needed him to do something truly awful— something that would cause enough fallout that it would force him into changing his behavior towards Young, and really force him into changing his behavior towards himself, or at least reevaluating it. While this is part of the escalating series of betrayals that I mentioned previously, Rush doesn’t come out of it the same person that he went into it. It significantly changes his relationship with Young.

 

**Chapter Forty-Three**

The doctor’s flashback is one of the pieces of writing that I’m most proud of in this entire story. It’s packed with references and significance. We start out with him thinking of himself as “somehow _wrong…_ If he weren’t he would not be here, _”_ which directly echoes the way that Rush thinks of himself in the flashback to the laboratory. There’s the odd temporality of “the self he will become,” which connects to what the 30% version of Rush told Young about his own temporality, and the idea that AI!Rush will be Rush, though he isn’t currently. The doctor also thinks about his daughter that he wishes she were there, “although he would _never_ want her to be [there],” which echoes what Rush thought about Gloria in the laboratory. I also think that his definition of love is probably true.

My version of the AI is quite childish, and Young is very gentle with it here. He talks to it like a child, but I think they articulate some fairly sophisticated ideas. We have the returning idea that trauma is a ghost: it keeps on happening; it doesn’t stop happening, even though it should. Not thinking about the trauma won’t change the effects of it, which sort of relates to what TJ was reflecting on re: somaticization.

The AI’s struggle with pronouns here illustrates the limits of our ontological language. At some point it abandoned itself and became two people.

I offered what I still think is a really good reading of Rush’s obsession with workarounds, which is he himself, as a person, has had to devise workarounds in order to continue “operation”— in order to continue functioning in the world.

There’s a reminder here that being held down really panics Rush. I wanted to bring that back up so that it would be in people’s minds when Young orders him restrained in Chapter 45.

And again, Rush at the height of his fucked-up-edness: he’s so tender with Young, and he _does_ give a damn, and he _does_ listen to Young, but he still insists on pursuing this self-destructive course of action that’s going to destroy everything he cares about, because he sees himself as, essentially, a machine. 

There’s a bit of the jacket thing in the original story, but I foregrounded in a different way, so as to offer the suspicion that Rush had been taking his clothes off in Telford’s quarters. I really wanted to create a situation in which all of this evidence could be read as devastating confirmation that Rush had been sleeping with Telford.

I love this Gloria flashback. I wanted to make her temperamental and really _angry_ here, because I like the idea of her having had a temper. For those who aren’t familiar with the violin: when you’re starting out playing, on less expensive violins, you use fine tuners that are located on the lower part of the violin. More expensive violins are tuned with the pegs that stick out of the top, and which can often be a bitch to get unstuck. The Boccherini minuet is a piece for beginners, especially if you’ve learned in the Suzuki method, where it’s part of the canon. 

We see again here that Rush is more concerned about Young’s experience than his own wellbeing.

Rush, in my interpretation, didn’t want to go into the cabin because he was deceiving Young, and felt he didn’t deserve to.

I struggled with the later part of this chapter until I realized how I wanted to frame it, which was as a descent into ghost-story horror. I think at this point I may have already decided on the title and framing device for the next chapter, which both have to do with ghosts. As soon as I began writing this sort of strange atmosphere of shut-in psychological collapse, it fell into place. And it made sense to me that this would be the atmosphere, because Young and Rush are literally just experiencing awful thing after awful thing from across millennia, all the accumulated ghosts of Rush and the ship. Then, when Rush starts staring at the wall, it _does_ feel like something from a ghost story— as it should. 

There’s a moment here that’s the first of several I wove in where Young has trouble distinguishing between the AI! and “real” versions of Rush— it was AI!Rush who told him about the dreams. I wanted to push the idea that Young already subconsciously accepts them as the same person.

I liked the idea that the malware girl is actively frightening for Rush— and that he’s reassured by having Young there, even though there’s nothing Young can do. He doesn’t want Young to leave. He doesn’t want to be alone with the girl, any more than he has to. There’s something horrifying about her.

Young’s conversation with TJ is a fairly transparent set-up for what’s about to happen with the ghost girl, but I hope I set it up with what Rush says to her in her interlude. There’s a reason she has Carmen and their could-have-been future on the brain. This is the first time, I think, that Young really articulates, even to himself, that he wanted to be a father because he was afraid of his sexuality and thought that being a father would make him _normal_.

The tea exchange is from the original story, as is the idea of them going to Hawaii, although I rewrote the conversation a bit. I freely admit that I wanted to make this conversation as heartbreaking, in retrospect, as possible. I wanted it to be full of hope and tenderness, so that I could then absolutely destroy all of that hope and tenderness in Chapter 45.

 

**A Warning to the Curious**

The only real reason I stuck with Volker as the narrator for this interlude was that logistically there weren’t other options. It needed to be someone on the science team, and Eli seemed like the wrong fit for a ghost story.

And I wanted this to be a ghost story. I titled it after a ghost story, and I open it with a ghost story that then sets up the larger perception of this whole arc as a ghost story.

I once dated someone whose family owned a house on Nantucket, so my familiarity with the location is why I set the ghost story there. It is quite desolate at night— there is something primally terrifying about total darkness, which we tend to rarely experience these days— and having it be Nantucket also allowed me to fold in these class issues that explain, a little bit, the conflict between Rush and Volker. (I know a lot of people who play that whole “We’re not rich, we’re just…” game.)

I wanted to turn up the creepiness on Rush here, which I hope I succeeded at, even though a lot of this is drawn from the original story.

“There’s a chance that will be the case for the foreseeable future” because, obviously, Rush expects Young to abandon him as soon as he finds out.

When Volker tells Rush to stop fighting, he’s of course echoing Telford, who told Rush, “Don’t fight this.” So Rush is flashing back to the laboratory. Similarly, with “I don’t want to hurt you,” which Telford said while restraining him when the Nakai attacked.

“It’s the _past_ , it’s not _real.” “_ You _would_ think that.” is an exchange I’m very proud of. Rush knows very well how real and immediate the past can be. Volker’s ineffectual attempt to reassure himself that “it’s just a memory” connects to this; the whole arc about the Nakai ghost girl is about the fact that it’s _never_ just a memory; that trauma has effects in the present world.

 

**Chapter Forty-Five**

I probably had a clearer vision for this chapter than any other, except perhaps for the last few. I knew exactly what I wanted it to be like; I knew that I wanted it to be absolutely merciless and knife-like in its total devastation of Young. I knew, even, that I wanted him to feel like he was trying to exist in a vacuum, like he’d been airlocked. 

Part of what I mean when I say “knife-like” is _clean_ and _spare_ — so that, for instance, Young doesn’t spell out the way he’s put together the pieces, or what he thinks Rush has been doing. We get the truncated sentences whose endings are implied, and then the conversation with Rush where he just asks, “You and Telford. How long?” The reader has to follow Young to that place, and realize for themselves exactly what Young must be thinking.

There’s a series of lines here that are really painful because of what’s not said: “That night too?… I guess it would be hard to remember.” “It’s not like it matters.” “You got what you wanted. You always get what you fucking want.” We know, of course, that what happened that night matters _hugely_ to Young, and that he now feels completely used and betrayed by Rush.

Telford, in his confrontation, is being characteristic in two ways: (1) he’s deliberately antagonizing Young in the hopes of manipulating his emotions, and (2) he’s right. Young is compromised. Unfortunately, #1 makes it hard to take #2 seriously: he’s _so_ awful here, and he knows _exactly_ what to say to nail Young’s weak spots: that Rush has played Young for a fool, as Telford always said he would, and that Young is a bad commander who got caught thinking with his dick. 

The scene on the observation deck is pretty devastating, not least because of Rush’s distress at Young hurting himself. But also because of the way that Rush has seemingly destroyed not only his relationship with Young, but also all the progress Young has made towards coming to terms with himself. Young has made himself tremendously vulnerable, and he's been punished for it.

I suppose that Young going back to his quarters is a Materiality Watch, because I was very interested in the idea that Young and Rush really live together now (though, as TJ pointed out in her interlude, they don’t seem to have realized this) and that therefore if Young went back, he would be going back to a shared home. He wouldn’t be able to avoid the physical reminders of Rush’s presence.

The point at which Young tries to kiss TJ really marks his descent into Absolute Human Disaster Everett Young. He’s determined to prove that nothing he did with Rush matters, that really he _does_ want women, he can make it work, it was all just a delusion.

Then, of course, Young has to prove how much he doesn’t care, how much it doesn’t matter, by being as savage with Rush as possible— thus the language he uses, how graphic he gets, and then the sort of nuclear weapon move of telling Rush that he and Telford chatted all about what Telford did to Rush, and that everything Telford did to Rush was because of casual, controlling reasons— that there was no real meaning to it at all. 

There’s another little dropped hint here that Young doesn't always distinguish between “real” and AI!Rush— it was AI!Rush who told Young to let David have him.

I mentioned before that the girl pretty transparently represents heteronormativity; Young projects all of his most heteronormative fantasies onto her, and she responds to that, telling him that he was successful at hiding the fact that he was gay, and that it didn’t matter because he was a good dad. Importantly, too, loving her is easy and natural and seems to solve all of his problems, while loving Rush is a struggle and forces him to confront the social boundaries that constrain him.

Rush is partly responsible for what happens here: he realizes too late that he’s constructed a situation in which no one’s going to believe that he’s not crazy, because he’s been behaving in a totally crazy way, and in a way that offers plausible explanations for his psychotic break. His isolation and his unwillingness to trust or confide in Young have backfired. And of _course_ Young isn’t going to send for Telford, because Rush has created a scenario in which Telford has essentially taken Rush away from Young.

 

**Chapter Forty-Six**

“If you didn’t have me and Mom, you’d just have Nick. And I think we both know that’s no good.” As @zielenna said, THE GHOST WAS HETERONORMATIVITY THE WHOLE TIME! 

I thought it would make sense for the first flashbacks Young had to be really positive ones, to convince him that he loved this girl and wanted to be her father. That would be the foundation for the devastation at the end, when she reveals what may have happened to her. So I got to paint this portrait of the AI!doctor, who became a character about whom I had very strong feelings. I also had to create an idea of what Ancient culture might have been like. The second flashback is also one of those “seems to be about one thing, but is also about another thing” moments: “everything we love must change and so we lose what we love, even as we go on gaining it forever” is in some ways a summary of this story.

“How did Nick resist you?”/“He never wanted me.” That exchange is about larger issues.

We get the end of the previous, truncated flashback, in which it’s revealed that the doctor did not lose anything of himself by becoming the AI— that he could still ascend, importantly, and that it was a wonderful transformation. This tells us a lot about what will eventually happen to Rush, but also sets up the doctor’s hope that he will see his daughter again, which the Nakai then proceed to crush.

The “He can stop being something that feels” paragraph is intended to resonate with Rush, who has really in a lot of (less literal) ways tried to stop being something that feels, for similar reasons.

What saves Young, ultimately, is TJ’s love and her knowledge of him as a person. That’s pretty interesting— it’s a platonic love, but it’s very powerful. 

The flashback to TJ asking Young out drives home the point that Young has always conceptualized his non-heterosexuality as a failure, a defective part of himself: he _could_ love a sequence of _her_ s, but he fails to ever do so. 

This end flashback of Young meeting Rush is perhaps a bit on-the-nose; I wanted to highlight Rush’s _non_ -normativity, his resistance to all rules and zones and attempts to contain him. I like the image of Rush being like lightning that seems “to crack the sky open, like the world is an egg it’s too impatient to stay within.”

 

**Chapter Forty-Seven**

I was very interested in the flaw in Young’s reasoning: if AI!Rush isn’t actually Rush, then he can’t be responsible for Rush’s actions, and therefore Young can’t be angry at him. Young _is_ angry at him, of course, and AI!Rush obviously feels guilty, but it’s the basis on which they can work together despite what’s just happened.

The notion of Young refusing to look at AI!Rush’s mind comes from the original story, but I framed it in quite a different way here: the reason it’s so hurtful is because by refusing to open the lock, Young is rejecting the role of person whom Rush has grown to fit (whom Rush has grown to love), and simultaneously declaring that he doesn’t love Rush.

Because AI!Rush is less savagely guarded then Rush, we get a glimpse here of how devastated he is. And Young proceeds to further devastate him by engaging in some cutting and accurate psychological analysis. There’s no real resolution to their argument; Rush is right that Young was being vindictive and cruel, and Young is right that Rush fucked both of them over in the worst way possible, so Rush’s way out is to just use Young’s logic against him so they can function in the short-term.

I struggled enormously with writing the battle with the Nakai girl until I completely reconceptualized it. I realized that I needed to come up with a scenario that would fit thematically into the arc, and that would be fundamentally about Young and Rush’s relationship rather than anything else. I started out writing the Cheyenne Mountain hallway where TJ asked Young out, since that would relate to Young’s struggle with heteronormativity, and then I realized that the most natural thing would be for TJ herself to show up as a kind of sinister figure excoriating Rush. After all, the Nakai girl’s goal has always been to make her targets kill themselves. With access to Young’s scenarios, she could use the figures from those memories to break down Rush emotionally even as she tries to tear his code apart. The battle then became a series of locations that would destroy Rush bit by bit. I realized that I could rely on many locations that I’d already established, which would then carry more emotional weight and be easier for the reader to understand. Sheppard’s apartment was an obvious choice— obviously Sheppard, as the ghostly figure of Young’s troubled sexuality, _had_ to make an appearance. Rush and Young’s bedroom on Destiny offered the chance for a creepy version of Chloe to appear, and her accusations of betrayal would be especially painful for Rush. Wyoming is the landscape of the dream, and so has a lot of emotional power, but is (usefully for the Nakai girl) also of 30% Rush’s interface.

“But you’re not real; you’re not the one I— you’re not even something a person could—fuck, maybe you’re right, what fucking difference does it make at this point, but you’re not the one I— I can’t just— Fuck. Fuck.” Pretty obviously, Young does _not_ , in fact, mean, “the one I joined minds with” here. 

It’s the fact that Riley appears in Wyoming and then references Telford that clues Young into the fact that all of the Nakai girl’s representations are getting what they’re saying from Young’s own head. Rush, of course, has known this all along— that everything he’s listening to comes from Young. That’s why it’s been so difficult for him to ignore.

I knew from very early on, even before I knew that the characters were going to come in and talk to Rush, that Rush and Young were going to end up in the hotel in Colorado. In the original story, they end up next to Rush’s car in Minnesota, where Telford’s driven Gloria to the Mayo Clinic. That’s where Rush agrees to the experiment. But I had always known that my Rush agreed to the experiment and to sleeping with Telford at the same time, out of a general sense of hopelessness. And I knew it had happened in this hotel room. But it worked especially well to have Telford be able to actually appear here as the fatal figure: the one who tells Rush that Rush wants to kill himself. He really represents the final obstacle that Rush has to overcome: the self-destructive patterns and impulses that are ingrained in him. I tried to carefully calibrate what he says to also be things that Young could’ve thought: Young _has_ thought, in his angriest moments, that Rush is like Telford, that Rush is suicidally self-destructive, and all the rest of it.

And here Young’s jealousy of Telford actually becomes positive, since it drives him into Rush’s head.

I really liked the idea that there would be a mutual recognition in Rush’s head: part of what causes Young to accept this Rush as Rush is that the Rush-threads know him, just as he knows them. It's about being known as much as knowing. And it’s a double moment of recognition: he really hasn’t allowed himself to feel the grief of Rush’s loss, and he recognizes for the first time how enormous that grief is, how much he feels he’s lost in losing Rush. 

So— the decision to not show Rush destroying the program: I’m very against writing anything that doesn’t feel absolutely essential. And to me, this did not feel essential. This chapter wasn’t actually about Young and Rush destroying this malware. It was about Rush realizing how badly he’d hurt Young, and Young realizing that this was Rush. So I got cheeky and just acknowledged that no one actually cared about the destruction of the program. 

It was important to me in describing the difference between this Rush and the other that I not make it seem like this Rush was Like New. This is still a Rush who’s suffered a lot. His trauma is all still present. However, it’s no longer _pathological_. The AI gives him the resilience to heal from it, just as Young has done. 

I like the take that Rush offers here: “You told the AI that I don’t have the easiest time being a person. But I am a person. I can’t help that. I have to— I have the right to— make the best of it.” 

Of course, now that Young has recognized Rush as Rush, he has to accept that this Rush is responsible for the other Rush’s actions. 

Way back when I was imagining Rush and Telford’s relationship, I realized that Rush would feel incredibly guilty for having slept with Telford while Gloria was alive (as, timeline-wise, he would had to have done), but that in fact Gloria would have been the one who engineered the relationship. The original story has the idea that she was desperately trying to find ways to keep Rush alive. And it made perfect sense to me that she would have tried to enlist someone to care for him in her absence, and that Telford would have put a lot of effort into charming both her and Rush enough that he would seem like the obvious candidate. 

Young’s monologue here— “You said you wanted to live”— is very important. He is literally building the house for Rush— and it’s this attempt to teach Rush that there’s more to living than just saying yes because you don’t care enough to say no that ultimately allows Rush to ascend.

There’s quite a lot of explaining here, when really it all boils down to “There are some things a person doesn’t use as weapons, Nick.” “Not in my experience.” Which is true: in Rush’s experience, _everything_ gets used as a weapon against him. And the only way to defend himself is to play by the same rules.

Here, Young echoes Gloria: “Not everything is a fight you have to win.” 

The idea of Rush being _it_ will come back.

I was intrigued by the idea of Rush and Young being opposing substances that interact at the point of their collision. It also hearkens back to Chloe's conversation with Rush in quarantine, perhaps.

There’s a metaphorical element to Rush learning to like being held down, but it’s also a good illustration of that the AI does for Rush: that he’s still perhaps aware of being held down, but he doesn’t react with the pathological terror of other-Rush.

 

**Chapter Forty-Eight**

This chapter is essentially a long sex scene. But it begins with a very important moment: Young has brought them to the cabin, and I think it’s clear to both of them that if Young invites Rush into the cabin, he’s accepting the realness of this Rush. The cabin is the place he shares with Rush and no one else. So this is a very fraught entrance. 

The pieces of art in the hallway are Paul Klee’s “Ghost of a Genius” and “Angelus Novus,” for the record.

I’ve mentioned before that I like laughter in sex scenes. And I like it here.

Shoes are the hardest things to get off in sex scenes. They can’t come off sexily, and you always forget about them until it’s too late, and you have to go back and write them being taken off before pants. It’s very convenient to be able to think them into nonexistence.

We see here another element of Young not being entirely comfortable in his sexuality: he has a lot of trouble thinking the word “cock,” which would mean admitting to himself what he’s touching. There’s a bit of a meta-joke here, however, because I also was playing a game with myself about not using any words for genitalia. I think this is maybe the only time the word appears in the entire story? (ETA: It appears once more, in a flashback dialogue.) I was experimenting with “literary,” non-explicit sex scenes, although in fact they manage to be surprisingly explicit in spite of this experimentation!

“Nothing is going to resolve your psychosexual issues.” Still makes me laugh.

I had a long conversation with @havingbeenbreathedout about the politics of queer sex in this story. I’m very opposed to the overwhelming homonormativity of mainstream fandom, which often writes gay sex as following a progression that equates “real” sex and “real” intimacy with penetrative sex— tending to imply that heterosexual penetrative sex is the _really_ real sex act, and that gay sex is legitimate only insofar as it manages to reproduce this act. Often, anal sex is positioned as the sort of “marriage” of two male characters, the moment of ultimate intimacy. I wanted to avoid any suggestion of these tropes. But I also felt that penetrative sex was the right sex act for this scene, for two central reasons: (1) Rush wants to place himself in a position of vulnerability, to open and offer himself to Young after having betrayed him so terribly. Being the receptive partner in penetrative sex _does_ carry a lot of vulnerability with it, in part because we do have so many cultural ideas that attach themselves to that position. (2) I wanted Young to be given the opportunity to engage in a sex act that was undeniably gay, and anal sex is probably the most stigmatized gay sex act. Young doing this then becomes a way of embracing the sexuality that he’s just tried very hard to reject. 

So I went with that type of sex for this scene, but then I opted to go with non-penetrative sex for scenes in the future, even though these are part of a continuing journey towards intimacy for Rush and Young. (If anything, I think that oral sex ends up being more vulnerable and intimate for Young.) I also have penetrative sex _not_ be intimate between Young and Sheppard, much later, and that was a deliberate choice. I wanted the message to be that different sex acts can have different levels of intimacy depending on who’s engaging in them and how much they’re wanted, and why— there’s no inherent hierarchy of intimacy or legitimacy.

Anyway, Rush offers here, and it’s very clearly an offer. And Young doesn’t know what he’s doing! He has to be taught. (A pet peeve of mine in fan fiction is the magical universe in which all male characters are versed in the mechanics of anal sex.)

Young saying “Nick” is especially significant here because it’s an affirmation of who Rush is.

The “One of them felt safe” paragraph is a bit show-off-y, because the idea is that it’s not clear who is who,and that perhaps it’s the opposite of what you might expect.

The image of the flame that can be split between two candles without diminishing it is something that a rabbi told me in a conversation about God. NO ONE MAY EVER REVEAL HOW I HAVE MISUSED IT.

The idea of “holding down” becomes one that’s about safety and protection: that Young is holding Rush down in a way that makes him safe, rather than imprisoned.

I was very interested in the idea of them becoming one body that’s fucking itself, that fills both roles. It seems like there’s a lot to unpack there. Sex has a tendency to make them into one consciousness, and I suppose there’s also a lot to unpack in terms of why that might be— why my impulse is for that to be the case, and what that impulse has to do with materiality. 

Now it’s time for a little more devastation: Young has to _rip Rush apart_. I find this harder to read now than Chapter 45, which ought to be objectively more upsetting; for some reason, the detail of Young putting on his uniform in an empty house is terrible. And I wrote it!

 

**49\. Roulette**

I feel a great fondness for Gloria, and this was my chance to portray her in the way I wanted to: as someone forceful, lively, caring, but also imperfect. I already had quite a detailed mental picture of her backstory: I knew that she came from a very wealthy family, that she had a perhaps slightly naive view of class (she didn’t ever quite understand why Rush struggled with class issues so much, when his social class didn’t matter to her), that her defense mechanism was a sort of intentional quirkiness, that she had a keen understanding of Rush, in spite of his efforts to hide his woundedness.

I also knew that I didn’t want this interlude to just be about Rush, or about Telford. I wanted it to be about _Gloria_ , and the way in which she’s trying to exert control in a world that has made her feel totally powerless and vulnerable to the whims of chance. (Thus the title of the interlude.) She’s not coping very well with the idea that she’s going to die, and her attempt to arrange things for Rush is really a reaction to her sense that it’s the only thing she can actually control— she can protect the person she loves, even if she can’t protect herself. Of course, that in and of itself ends up being a spin of the roulette wheel (thus, also, the title of the interlude), and not a successful one.

The conversation between Rush and Gloria is a chance to see the intimacy between them. But it’s also a glimpse at a different Rush: one who’s less guarded, or who feels safe enough in this relationship to express sincere emotion. We also see how well Gloria understands him: “Nick isn’t always good at expressing himself in words. No one ever taught him the right language. Or are we born with the right language, and someone stripped it out of him? She worries. She worries what will happen when there’s no one left to understand the strange, frightened, quiet ways he expresses his affection, which are subtle and heartfelt and not always easy to detect” is really important, I think; as is her awareness of the way he struggles to say “I love you” back. Even though Rush has tried to prevent her from knowing how “damaged” he is, she actually _does_ know how quite a lot about him, and it doesn’t prevent her from loving him.

In her conversation with Telford, we also get a sense that in some ways Gloria’s relationship with Rush was similar in dynamic to Young’s relationship with Rush. She provided him with the stability that allowed him to flourish (and he provided her with a sense of challenge and freedom). This was an interesting idea to me because it can be quite stereotypical for a woman to be the stable, domestic partner in a relationship— the one who takes care of the fragile male genius so that he can be a mess. But Gloria, as she also notes during her conversation with Telford, _isn’t_ what most people would call domestic. She herself is a bit of a dramatic genius— we already know she has a slightly flamboyant streak; she’s a musician; she travels all over the world. In fact, it's _Rush_ who stays at home and cares for her orchids (or tries to). That subverts the normative model. And I tried to make it clear that she herself wasn’t his stability; she _taught_ him how to live in a stable world.

In the original story, I think Rush learned to play piano at a professional level in like a week or something. But as a classically trained musician, I know that this isn’t possible— it’s not about genius; it’s about training the body to be able to do certain things. (Probably this counts as a Materiality Watch.) Even if you’re a genius, you have to put in a certain amount of time physically learning the motions. It just might take you less time than other people, because you’re able to do the mental stuff faster. 

Gloria and Telford are, of course, having two different conversations here, and we know how badly all of this is going to turn out. But I hope that it comes off as tragic rather than as unforgivable on Gloria’s part. She spun the roulette wheel at a point in her life when there was very little she could do, and when she was at her most vulnerable. She was trying very hard to protect Rush.

 

**50\. The Glass Cage**

This is the only chapter of the story to come with its own content warning, so of course it’s Telford’s interlude.

I had written an earlier version of more-or-less this interlude before I began writing the story, and some of that made it in here, though the circumstances of Rush and Telford’s encounter had changed significantly. The things I kept are largely a Materiality Watch: I was interested in the idea that Telford wanted to get _inside_ Rush's body, and that he’d been disappointed by the experience of doing that via the communication stones. To me, Telford in this story wants to _possess_ and _control_ Rush, and Rush’s inherent transgressiveness denies him that opportunity, which only makes him want it more. That’s why Telford becomes so fixated. Telford doesn’t like things that he can’t control. 

The idea that everything Telford touches carries the mark of his hand on it relates to a dream Rush had very early on in which Telford touched him and left a mark on him— as, indeed, Telford left a less physical mark on him.

I feel like Rush is transparent in this conversation with Telford: his hostility and his attempts at defense are clumsy and almost childish, perhaps because he hasn’t yet learned to perfect the art of savagery (which Young, way back in the first chapters, suggested that he learned from Telford).

This is where Telford tells Rush what AI!Rush will later repeat to Young: “There’s no such thing as what you’re allowed to do,” etc. Which, again, is not an untrue or unimportant piece of advice.

Telford’s reading of Rush here is, unfortunately, very perceptive: Rush is hugely vulnerable for exactly the reasons that Telford outlines, and he’s very starved for someone to tell him who he is, who he _has_ to be. I think what Telford isn’t quite aware of is that Rush also feels terribly unstable at this moment, and Telford is offering him a type of relationship that is very familiar to him— a dynamic that Rush understands, one that he understands his role in.

This is all yet another demonstration of Rush saying yes to things in order to try and assert some kind of control over them: he says yes to Telford and then throws himself into both the sex and the experiment as though he can prove to himself that he wants this, and that therefore he’s not being manipulated or taken advantage of. It’s like Rush is “doing this to himself,” as Telford notes. 

That idea appears again in the idea that Rush has signed his body over to Telford: _he’s_ made the decision; he’s _chosen_ to surrender control, so everything that happens is his choice (and his fault). This is one of those Rush paradoxes: he’s in control and out of control; he chooses to put himself in a position that he hates, partly to punish himself, and partly because the dynamic is familiar to him. 

The cigarette exchange here clarifies the earlier cigarette exchanges between Rush and Telford and, then, Rush and Young: the cigarettes represent a kind of control that Rush accepts from Telford and offers to Young.

We know that Rush _is_ inclined to cuddle— that with Young he’s starved for contact, desperate to touch and hold and be held by Young. So it’s quite revealing that he doesn’t do that with Telford here. It’s pretty clear that neither of them either particularly cares about the other in any way.

Rush’s thoughts about mountains (which are my thoughts on mountains, from when I lived in Montana) reappear later in Young’s mind, as a hint that he’s slipping into being Rush.

I like the skewed temporality of Telford not having created Rush yet, but already feeling like his creator. In some ways, that mirrors the skewed temporality of AI!Rush being what Rush will become.

And again, Rush does something he clearly doesn’t want to do in order to take control of the situation in some way. He feels desolate and powerless and hurt, so he decides to have sex with Telford again, which will actually make him feel more of all of those things.

The paragraph where Telford tugs the comforter up over Rush and then casually thinks about how he’s going to take care of Rush after sort-of-killing him and having him tortured by the Lucian Alliance is probably the most Telford that Telford gets.

Except: I take that back, because the next paragraph, on Destiny, is also extremely Telford. He feels powerless, which is why he plays this power game with Rush (partly as a way of getting back at Young). He has no genuine sexual interest in Rush or, I suspect, in anyone. Sex for him is exclusively about power.

I didn’t want this scene on Destiny to be exploitative, and I knew I was running the risk of that happening. I tried to walk a fine line. Probably the closest the scene comes to sleazy is when Rush says that Telford can jerk off on his stomach, but I wanted that to be about Rush degrading Telford. In their earlier confrontation, there’s so much talk about who has to beg who for what, and that dynamic is really present here: Telford is enjoying that Rush has to beg him for the Tok’ra device, and then Rush tries to seize control by implying that Telford would beg him for sex, or that Telford wants him enough to take whatever scraps Rush will give him. Then, of course, Telford manages to imply that Rush is his pet by telling him to “go fetch” with the Tok’ra device. None of this is really about sex. It’s all a power struggle.

I thought that it was interesting for Telford to hold Rush down, and for Rush to panic, because I believe what Telford says here: he’s not into scaring Rush or _forcing_ Rush to do anything. He gets off on manipulation. He sees Rush’s reaction as being an attempt to manipulate him because he understands Rush only in terms of the power struggle between them— not as a human being who can be scared and traumatized. (This also contrasts with the way Young treats Rush in bed later, when he’s very concerned about not frightening Rush.)

There’s another example here of Telford being right: what he says to Rush about the people Rush should worry about is really true. 

More foreshadowing on Rush-as-nuclear-weapon here.

Telford’s reflections at the end are quite complicated, because in a lot of ways Telford is accurate here. Rush doesn’t know how to act like a person, and Rush often is… not happier, but more _comfortable_ when people don’t treat him like a person. And it _is_ painful to have to learn to be a person. But what Telford isn’t allowing Rush here is the potential for change, which of course is what the story as a whole embraces.

And Telford is right that Young has built a “box” for Rush, in a sense; Young has built a _house_ for Rush, one that isn’t a trap, and that has no fixed borders. Rather than gaslighting Rush into accepting invisible confines, as Telford did very successfully, Young invited Rush to build the house _with_ him (which is why it’s so important that we see Rush shaping and populating the cabin).

The last line here has, of course, a significant double meaning, and in that sense is really quite sad.


	3. Chapters 51-74

**Chapter 51**

This scene was quite interesting to write because Rush and Young are at such different places in it. The last thing that’s happened for Young is the experience of having to tear AI!Rush apart, leaving him alone in the interface. He came to the infirmary because he so desperately needed to be close to Rush and feel like he wasn’t losing him. But the last thing that’s happened for Rush is being restrained and drugged at Young’s orders, which was enormously traumatic for him. He hates himself, hates Young, and believes that their relationship is over. In his conversation with the AI, he’s trying to escape from the infirmary before Young wakes up so he won’t have to face Young— though he’s also desperate to exercise some kind of agency in the wake of having been restrained. 

I’m not sure if it quite comes across, but Rush also doesn’t want Young to know, at first, that he can’t speak English well. He’s trying to cling to every shred of armor he’s got, because he feels so obliterated by what’s happened and so sure that he’s going to have to defend himself.

Again there’s a connection between Rush’s inability to tolerate touch and what Telford did to him: Rush let Young touch him, and Young pinned him down to a table and drugged him, which is an echo of the Telford incident. Rush’s anger here is really legitimate; he made himself vulnerable to Young and Young used that against him, which is exactly what Rush was afraid of, and why he protects himself so violently. What’s terrible is that Rush feels (not without reason) that he _deserved_ it. That’s why we get this broken monologue (the one starting “Shut up. _Shut up_ ”) in which Rush is sort of being sarcastic and sort of not at all: It’s essentially a long elaboration of “Yeah, I’m the _worst person in the world_ , I get it,” but he does feel like the worst person in the world for what he has done and is going to do to Young. He _does_ feel like (or fear, maybe) there’s nothing inside of him.

Young’s extreme sense of grief here is, as he recognizes, not really about this version of Rush— it’s a reaction to the fact that he literally had to _unmake_ a version of Rush a few hours ago, and now he can’t even hold onto or take care of this version. Of course Rush doesn’t understand why he’s so upset— Rush doesn’t know what’s happened. From Rush’s perspective, Young went from being furious at him to suddenly wanting him again.

The way that Rush pushes at Young is consistent with this running characterization of him as a bit like a feral animal, but probably is ultimately inspired by a moment in Pat Barker’s _Regeneration_ that was really formative for me, in which a traumatized WWI soldier butts at his doctor like a baby goat. I always understood that as coming from an inability to contain emotion and a need to be touched, but a lack of any way to express that emotion or ask for touch. That made sense for Rush here. (I think sometimes about the fact that as obvious as it is that Young came from a hyper-masculine, heteronormative culture— I mean, Young comes with all the trappings of cowboy-ness and the military— Rush actually _also_ came from a hyper-masculine, heteronormative culture. Later, Young reflects on the fact that he came from a place where men didn’t touch each other. And as defiant as Rush is about his sexuality, that’s actually also true for him, and I think perhaps influences his inability to ask for the kind of touch he needs.)

It felt important to me to acknowledge that Young’s quarters are really now _their_ quarters— to establish that Rush isn’t a visitor there, or someone whom Young can kick out. That’s their shared home. They live there. And I think it was important for _Young_ to establish that.

I think I included parts of the next exchange from the original story just so I could get the “You or me or the AI?”/“Yes.” q&a, which is such a nice bit of hinting at the confusion between the three of them.

Again with the materiality when they get back to their quarters: no one’s cleaned up, so they _would_ be surrounded by the material reminders of everything that’s taken place.

I’m never quite sure, on rereading, whether I think I should have included the line about Young thinking that Rush has really fucked-up ideas about sex. Because Young absolutely thinks that, because he comes from a traditional Christian background, but I suppose I worry it comes off as a bit authorial-voice, and I’m not sure that Rush’s ideas about sex necessarily _are_ fucked-up— sex _can_ be casual and/or contractual, and the reason the Rush and Telford thing was fucked-up is more complicated than “oh, it’s never okay to have sex in order to get something from someone else.” It has to do with other factors surrounding what constitutes consent, what constitutes a healthy sexual exchange, et cetera. I mean, everything surrounding Rush and consent is really complicated, because he continually consents to things that he doesn’t want, and often things that are going to hurt or damage him, in order to take control of them. I don’t think the way we normally conceptualize consent has a good way to account for that.

Because Rush is still drugged, we get a more-accurate-than-usual expression of his frustrations. How are you supposed to navigate a relationship with someone if you can’t remember all your encounters with them, and only sometimes speak their language? 

Of course, Young’s attempts at reassurance only make things worse, because Rush already knows at this point that they’re going to be separated, no matter what— that he’s going to do something unforgivable to Young in the end, to this person who is giving Rush everything he could possibly want or ask for, and who has against all odds not been destroyed by this terrible thing Rush has done.

That relates to why this idea of Young being strong comes back later— Rush seems to feel like he _needs_ someone as strong as Young, someone who _won’t_ be destroyed, someone who can protect him and wants to protect him.

With the dream about the cabin, I wanted there to be a bit of a question of which Rush is in the dream, or whether it’s even possible to characterize the dream-Rush like that. After all, Rush and the AI share a subconscious. So dream-Rush should have access to all the pieces of all of the memories, even if he’s not quite put together in the same way as AI!Rush. So this seems like a kind of in-between Rush who’s not quite one or the other. 

Then there’s this frankly painful gradual disintegration, and I wanted to show a gradual lack of self-ness, a gradual inability to understand narrative and context and concept and even words. The most fractured part is a bit of a word puzzle, where the letters at first look random but usually aren’t— you can see that sometimes words have been broken vertically, and sometimes horizontally, and sometimes they intersect (brok/en cubaid stae, which is an Ancient phrase that showed up much earlier and means “stay in bed”).

_Was_ it cheating for Young to sleep with AI!Rush? This is one of those questions that’s difficult to answer. I don’t think _Rush_ considers it cheating. The difficulty of answering it suggests the failure of our system for conceptualizing the self.

I found it really interesting that when I thought about Rush being warm in the interface, it was much easier to draw a clear line and say, “Yes, of course it’s better that he’s warm. _God_.” But because of the way we conceptualize trauma and the self, even I find myself resisting saying that about the lessening of his psychological pain. 

And… the giving of the dog tags. I wondered if this was a bit too sentimental? It’s also an obvious set-up for _something_ in the future. But I liked the idea very much, for a number of reasons: (1) it suggests that Young is taking seriously what happens in the immaterial world— he’s giving the material Rush this material gift as a way of ameliorating immaterial problems. (2) It’s Young offering a kind of possession and a literal _chain_ that Rush can choose to accept, which shows a great deal of growth on Rush’s part from his horror at the idea of _any_ kind of possession or chain. (3) There was something in the idea of Rush being identified as Young, or part of Young, or in some part Young that seemed interesting given their confusion of selves. Also, it _does_ work very well in the future. As soon as I’d written it, I knew that Rush was going to want to throw the dog tags through the wormhole and not be able to make himself do it.

 

**Chapter 52**

I imagined the piece that Rush was playing at the beginning of this chapter as being the piano part of Schubert’s “Der Lindenbaum.”

It seemed important to me that Young hasn’t just been repressing his sexuality, as though that’s not related to anything else in his life; in a way, doing that has meant that he hasn’t allowed himself to _feel_ the whole range of emotions that others are allowed. Now he no longer has that repression to keep emotion at bay.

This scene with Wray really mostly exists so that we can see that Young is still struggling with being open about his relationship with Rush, and still struggling with Telford’s accusation that he’s compromised. Which he is! But there’s a real question as to whether that’s a bad thing. Wray is right here: that in this case, someone probably _needs_ to be compromised in order to protect Rush, not least from himself.

I could have written chapters of just Rush and Young bickering, interspersed with Rush and Young making catty comments at each other while Chloe was trying to have a conversation with Rush.

I thought this scene between Chloe and Rush was going to be about Chloe asking Rush to give her away at her wedding (which needed to happen for maximum devastation on Chloe’s part, and to have the wedding make sense as the finale of the story), but it ended up being about grief and resilience. Rush is talking to himself on two levels here: simultaneously making the healing gesture of realizing that it’s all right for him to love Young, yet also reassuring himself that Young will be able to love again when he loses Rush. This whole scene is particularly devastating for him because it’s about having these loving relationships with both Chloe and Young, and realizing how profoundly he’s going to abandon both of them.

I wanted this briefing scene to be a reminder of how little has actually been resolved, either in the outside world or between Rush and Young. People on the ship have no idea what’s going on, the flashbacks are still an occasional problem, the Nakai tracking device still has to be taken out, and Rush and Young haven’t really processed what they did to each other. Ultimately, Rush fucks up by bringing up the idea of distracting Young with sex (after Telford has already come up), Young overreacts to being manipulated by Rush, and it’s clear that they need to actually work through this in some way. 

My intent with that mess was to set up this sex scene. I wanted the sex scene to be about two things: (1) Young re-establishing that Rush actually wants to have sex with him, after his horror at the idea that Rush might be doing so just to manipulate him into things, and (2) Rush having agency restored to him after the dehumanizing experience of being restrained and drugged. So the scene starts out with Rush trying to push Young away out of what’s clearly fear— Rush is afraid that Young’s anger in the briefing is a sign that Young _hasn’t_ forgiven him, so in typical Rush style, he decides to provoke Young so that he feels he controls Young’s reactions and can tell himself that he _made_ Young throw him out. But Young’s response is to offer him intimacy and refuse to let Rush characterize it as some kind of contractual exchange (like Young is claiming the benefit that Rush promised him). Young then introduces this running question about presumptuousness, which is this kind of absurd, teasing question that _isn’t_ a question about consent and therefore doesn’t characterize Rush as a victim or raise his hackles. It’s a game, but it’s a game that lets Young continually check that Rush actually wants what Young is doing. 

At the same time, Young is also making himself more vulnerable. There are several points in this scene where he feels ashamed or feels like he _should_ be ashamed of what he’s doing: nipples shouldn’t be involved, because they’re unmasculine, and that’s somehow degrading; being on his knees is maybe a little bit unmasculine, and wanting Rush’s male body is shameful. And Young _likes_ being on his knees, later, which is more shameful; he _likes_ being in the less “masculine” position when he takes on the “name for what he was now,” which is of course “cocksucker”; he likes the taste, afterwards, that reminds him of “who he is now.” In a lot of ways, this is more difficult for him than the penetrative sex in the interface. But it’s also extremely liberating. I think it’s important to realize that confronting these ingrained ideas about what is and isn’t shameful or permitted in sex _can_ be really challenging and uncomfortable, but _at the same time_ can be a good, positive, hot experience, which it is here. The fact that it’s challenging for Young is part of why he wants to do it, I think: he deliberately chooses to put himself in this position of vulnerability, in part because he realizes that he’s made Rush feel very frightened and powerless.

I mentioned previously that writing Rush in sex scenes sometimes felt like writing a rape survivor, and this is probably the clearest moment of that— when Young asks if what he’s doing is all right and then kisses Rush “to make up for having asked or, really, for having had to ask, which was to say for the fact that it had happened, and that he would always have to ask.” The having to be asked is part of the trauma, really— having to be asked wounds Rush, which is why he hates it so much at the same time as, _even after being asked_ , he instinctively positions himself so he can shove Young off him if he has to. (This is in part a reaction to having just been strapped down in the infirmary.) 

There’s maybe a slight hint here of the whole Dead Dove: Do Not Eat history of Rush and Telford.

Rush tries to make a distinction that Young doesn’t quite get; he wants Young to know that he isn’t lying about the important things.

 

**Chapter 53**

This chapter, I believe, was two chapters in the original story. Or the previous chapter and this one were divided up differently in some way that wasn’t quite working for what I was doing? I cut a lot of material from the section with the attempt to locate the tracking device on the hull, because my writing style is much more impatient and focused. I knew I was also going to be adding material with Chloe, because I wanted to really foreground the idea that Rush specifically refused to leave _her_ (as, post-Gloria, he pathologically refuses to leave anyone he loves, which raises an interesting question about whether his ability to separate himself from Young, which seems cruel, is actually a move towards _healing_ )— and then have her really break down over the result of that. A lot of small-work went into building that decision and breakdown; for instance, even the two of them joking about Eli is a reminder of how close they are, so that there’s no question that Rush will refuse to leave her. 

The “No; I’m your—/“ “My _what?_ ” exchange is an interesting one both because it sets up an element of this arc (Rush and Young’s inability to admit love to each other, and Rush’s inability to believe in the reality of their relationship) and because it actually has a more practical legitimacy to it: there _is_ no word for what they are to each other.

I’m very proud of the way that I used the marble supertask to heighten the tension through pacing just before the flare hits.

There was a question of how I was going to describe what it would be like for Young to be split apart from Rush— what that was going to be like for him somatically. I put a lot of emphasis on the idea that Rush’s body is in some sense part of Young’s body— that his cognitive map includes an awareness of Rush’s body, so that he really feels like he’s losing a limb that was never attached to him, and there’s this spiraling confusion about what the boundaries of his body are, and what the relationship between him and his body is. That also manifests itself in his sense of bodily disorientation when he wakes up. (Less philosophically, this might have been influenced by the fact that I was experiencing episodes of terrible vertigo when I was writing this.)

The Destiny half of this arc is really a story about Young and the AI coming to terms with each other and recognizing their similarities, so I tried to bring that forwards. Structurally, Young and the AI are the same position here: two people who form parts of a sort of overlapping being, facing the loss of the third part of their being. But I had also know for a long time that later, when Young went to Atlantis, he would sleep with Sheppard in part because he had loved the AI. It was important to me that Young learn to love the AI. It’s not the same love he has for Rush, obviously, just as Rush’s love for the AI is not the same as his love for Young, because the AI is a different sort of creature and can’t be subject to or support the same type of love that Rush and Young have for each other. It’s much less complex. But all the same, the AI is eventually _part_ of Rush, and for that ending to be reconcilable, Young had to love it at least a little. Is his love for it separable from his love for Rush, who is so tied up with the AI? Probably not, but I don’t think that invalidates it. 

When Young is severed from Rush, I use a drastically different prose style to suggest to the reader the off-kilter and _lacking_ nature of what’s going on in his head. The sentences become extremely short, almost fragmented, standing as their own paragraphs, and absent almost all emotional content. Young isn’t registering everything that’s occurring, and he isn’t able to piece it together in a way that really makes sense, because he’s so dazed and injured by the separation. 

I really wanted Chloe to have a moment to act out her grief, or act out _in_ grief here. She’s so often quiet or skittish or nervous or uncertain in the story, and here she’s so angry— at herself, really, and at Rush, but with no outlet for that emotion.

The AI is very child-like here: “You can’t make me!” and “I do not like the dark.” I found the idea of the AI as child-like very compelling as a way to suggest its lack of complexity, but also its potential and human-ishness. Children are people, after all.

I know I’m terribly mean to Eli, but honestly, Young _is_ a colonel in the Air Force. 

I was always entranced by the idea of Young flying the ship, and I want it to be a haunting and beautiful moment. There’s the same music here, like the sound of the aurora borealis, and the philosophical elements of Young’s experience draw heavily on Karen Barad’s agential realism. The question of separation and coming-together is quite important in this story, obviously, and here it leads to the moment when Young realizes that Rush is actually gone— that they’ve been severed from one another.

 

**54\. TTBP: Part One**

This was the chapter that was almost the death of me. 

In conceptualizing it, I knew from the start that I wanted it to be in two columns: one the column of Rush’s in-the-moment narration, and the other the column of people/ships/memories interacting with Rush. In order to do this, I had to use CSS and go through an agonizing process of trial and error in terms of getting the right side to line up with the left side, so that it would be clear what was triggering each memory and at what point each input was being received. It took… so long. But I was _determined_ to make this goddamn thing look like I wanted it to.

The reason I was committed to the two-column format is that it illustrates the extent to which Rush’s mind now operates in a radically different way to “normal” human consciousness, which is about to become very salient. The two columns are alien and difficult to read, which forces the reader to engage with Rush’s difference. Of course, we also see that Rush conceptualizes his own difference as part of a spectrum; he was already different, and now he is more different, but not _less human_ , as Young might think of him. 

A lot of the narration was written rather like poetry, line following naturally after line, and not strictly planned— so for instance the idea of Rush tracking time by Young’s heartbeats, and Rush’s own heart and brain being too quick even as he castigates himself for being too slow to ever save anyone. 

Rush is also a highly unreliable narrator here; of _course_ he’s traumatized and scared, but to admit this would destabilize his world. So instead he reframes his experiences as an existential condition. Which— in part his dislike of being restrained _is_ an existential condition! But it’s also the result of trauma. I’m not sure how one would draw the lines that separate those things.

Rush is quite clinical here in expressing his violent dislike of being owned, and sometimes of being held still— he acknowledges that sometimes he finds it “almost intolerably restful” when Young holds him still, but he also has a strong negative reaction to it here, which is easier to understand in tandem with the memories of Telford on the right-hand side and with his conflation of protection and control. I felt it was important not to make him sentimental. In many ways Rush has very little self-awareness, compared to Young, or perhaps he simply has more and more dangerous blind spots about himself. 

That’s quite an unsympathetic Rush, the Rush who seemingly doesn’t care about being separated from Young, and I think the next paragraph of narration is important in balancing that. He’s able to cut himself off from conscious emotion when necessary, though I would argue that this isn’t the same as cutting himself off from emotion as a whole; his body is still affected by it, but he’s learned to detach himself from the conscious awareness. And really there’s something quite anguished about this paragraph as I read it. He’s afraid that he is heartless, and sick with guilt over what he is doing and will do to Young, and by the time you get down to “frankly there’s not enough of him to fucking go around,” the idea has been introduced of completeness— the idea that will turn into the question of whether he is one hundred percent of himself, and whether he can give Young anything less than that. 

As Rush begins to separate from Young and the AI, his narration grows less coherent, and we get another reference to houses/walls/borders: “the walls the walls come tumbling down,” the walls that Chloe talked to him about, the house that Young is for him and the structure the AI provides. The idea of the two of them trying to hold him like water comes from the original story, and I loved it, but I’ve done something slightly different with it here— asking what the water is and having Rush be afraid that there is nothing left.

Then, after the final severing, what happens conceptually is that Rush has no boundaries of self anymore, so it is unclear to him what information does and does not belong to him. It’s not clear to him if he is the shuttle or not, what size he is, whether he is too little or too much, whether he is a thing at all. What he clings to, ultimately, is this idea of not being able to leave anything that loves him, and being willing to feed himself to anyone who expresses the least interest in him— that’s what causes him to give himself over to being the shuttle. There’s this idea here that what he’s feeding them is actually the water he mentioned, which is in some sense his selfhood— I think it’s probably true that Rush pathologically has no ability to limit what he gives to other people, even if it’s only to manipulate them. What _does_ happen when they drink all the water?

Finally, the statements about the shuttle are really, of course, statements about Rush (who has become the shuttle at this point).

 

**55\. TTBP: Part Two**

Greer’s parts of this arc lean more heavily on the structure of the original story, though not so much the prose. I had already developed a voice for Greer that I liked, and I write in it here.

The opening paragraph about therapists’ waiting rooms is both my own observation and also a way of reminding the reader that Greer has a history of emotional problems (stemming from his abusive childhood), which becomes significant in that it’s the common ground he and Rush share.

The worm-snake-dinosaur spine lizard is a reference to an episode of SG1 where they go to a planet and the lake on it is infested with primitive Goa’uld that, like, come flying out of the lake and worm their way into people’s spines. Do you ever wonder how anyone in the Stargate universe sleeps at night or is willing to go to other planets _at all?_

I apologize to South Carolina. I know that parts of it are perfectly nice. But parts of it are extremely swampy, and it struck me as the Southern-twilight-down-home place that Greer would least like to end up— even an empty version, without the racism. And calling the planet South Carolina amused me a lot.

I have a running joke with myself about little plush dolls that are programmed to say things. I used to say that I’d like to have a little plush doll of Jean-Paul Marat that would demand exponentially increasing numbers of heads, which I promise is _extremely_ funny if you’re familiar with the French Revolution.

Both here, where Greer’s been learning Ancient, and in the previous chapters where Young was trying to learn Ancient, I tried to give an accurate impression of people with no experience of foreign languages trying to speak one. The process of language learning is one that fascinates me. People who have never studied a foreign language seriously tend to not have a lot of insight into the notion of grammatical structure, so they want to translate word-for-word without understanding concepts of case or tense. Greer actually doesn’t do a terrible job here.

I became entranced with the idea that Rush was still not able to distinguish himself wholly from the shuttle. So here’s not quite sure if he’s the shuttle, and it’s not clear _who_ doesn’t understand what’s happened to “it.”

From the moment the dog tags came into play, I knew that they would provide a material source of comfort and connection for Rush on this planet. In a way, they’re serving the exact purpose that Young intended when he gave them to Rush: keeping him grounded in himself, reminding him of who he is.

Materiality Watch: I was very interested in what this planet would look and feel like. Its sun is the only star in the immediate vicinity, so presumably no stars would be visible to the naked eye. That seems like it would be peculiar and unsettling. Later, I tried to invent similarly unsettling flora.

The idea of Rush not being “one hundred percent” him is a significant one. Rush doesn’t seem capable of fulling intending or comprehending the implications of it here, but perhaps he does understand that he’s not talking about this moment— he’s talking about the larger issue of who he’s going to end up as, and specifically if Young will be able to love that person.

 

**56\. TTBP: Part Three**

Goodbye to two-column format! Not only was it a bitch to work with, but it didn’t allow me the flexibility of text placement that I knew I would need for Rush’s remaining interludes: I wanted to be able to have text float on the page, be scrambled, and most importantly I wanted to work with more than two “channels” of text. Throughout the rest of this arc, Rush’s consciousness primarily operates on three levels: the level of interaction (both with Greer and with his hallucinations), the level of immediate observation and thought, and the level of deeper thought (often flashbacks or what he is trying to repress). But when his thoughts are more disordered, these boundaries aren’t strict.

From the start, “Young” is a mechanism that Rush uses to reassure and stabilize itself. “Young” continually attempts to soothe him and ground him. So he initially appears here when Rush is starting to panic because he’s not sure who or what he is, and both comforts him and prompts him to ask himself the name/date/location questions.

I can’t quite remember how it occurred to me to bring Wittgenstein in here, but his notes _On Certainty_ are so applicable to so much of what Rush struggles with that once I’d thought of it, I couldn’t resist it. There were more quotes I considered but didn’t bring in. 

I’m a _very_ big fan of minimalist poetry, and so I gleefully attacked these Rush sections of the arc— I loved that I could do things like simply have the word “Hawaii” hanging in the leftmost (least conscious) side of the page, suggesting so much that wasn’t explicitly stated. 

I had been to the Pitt Rivers Museum in November, and I suppose it was still kind of stuck in my brain. I liked the idea that it suggested parts of Rush’s memory that he had no clear access to— he might not know what Oxford is, but he knows that this color is the color of a piece of ivory scrimshaw in that museum.

Again on the poetry track: I felt so able to express really important ideas in these brief, choppy observations: the observation that the rocks are not alive points towards Rush experiencing a profound uncertainty about animacy, or not knowing the _rules_ of animacy. That makes sense, because he’s still struggling with the idea that he _was_ the shuttle (which _was_ alive, maybe) and now he’s _not_ and it’s _dead._

(At the time I was writing this arc, I was teaching the Jeff VanderMeer novel _Borne_ , and I think some of that crept into my writing. The titular character of that book is a sort of amorphous child-like creature that doesn’t understand human categories of life and death. Rush isn’t exactly child-like here, but he is unaware of the correct categorizations.

“Telford” is the second hallucination to appear here, because Rush has started to think about the water and needs a way to repress his thoughts and feelings. So Telford shows up to do that. If you’ve read the original story, you know that there Rush deliberately creates a hash table and uses people as ways to access information. But that’s not really the way a hash table works (shoutout to @etirabys for helping me out with some of my computer science), and I found it more compelling if Rush was only vaguely aware of the way his brain was coping with the situation. His hallucinations here serve something of the same functions, but he’s not really clear at first on what they’re doing. So here Telford seems to only be showing up to torment Rush, which he does very effectively— in part by being basically truthful, in a lot of ways (but in a deliberately nasty fashion).

(A little bit of Rush/Telford horribleness floats to the lefthand side of consciousness.)

Rush, of course, is very nervous about people thinking he’s crazy, because the last time that happened he got put in restraints and shot full of Haldol.

The return of the fish and the fisherman here, raising questions about what the relationship between Rush and Destiny is.

When Rush starts to spiral into a sort of ontological crisis here, raising a question that will become very important (why would Young love him?), it’s Young’s dog tags that again ground him.

Being me, I had to work some references to the Manhattan Project in there— Alamogordo being the site of the Trinity test, and the green glass being the trinitite that it formed in the desert.

I think we all know what Rush wishes he could tell Young.

 

**57\. TTBP: Part Four**

I have been known to call people out on Cartesian dualism, which is the notion that the mind and body are separate things. “Homunculus fallacy” here specifically refers to the idea that there’s a self “inside” the body, looking out. 

There’s a hint here that Rush is suffering from some of the same bodily effects as Young— that he’s finding it hard to balance. Of course, he wouldn’t be aware of that.

Greer is the most patient human being in the world. How many times in this arc does he laboriously try to help Rush or protect Rush, only for Rush to yell at him or get snippy or otherwise be the most irritating person imaginable?

Materiality Watch: I liked the idea of an eerie forest in which there was no animal life at all. That would constantly ring bells of paranoia in the human brain, because it’s typically a hint that there’s danger approaching. So sound (or lack of sound) became important here, as did these bone-like trees.

You can’t put me in a box. “Who’s trying to put you in a box? Have you contacted the police?” 

Greer _gets_ the ways in which a box can be a good thing; here, he views it as shelter— house-like. Originally, I had a little digression here about Sukkot, and the idea of shelter, but it just wasn’t very realistic that Greer or Rush would be familiar with Sukkot, and it wasn’t adding a lot to the scene. 

This funny conversation about being on a camping trip immediately becomes quite a serious conversation about the fact that they both had very troubled childhoods.

Rush’s line about the stars in northern Wyoming is what Young said to him in the dream about the tent, back in chapter 15.

THE RETURN OF GHOSTS TO THE STORY. Listen, I find Greer’s refusal to deal with the issue of ghost shuttles so hilarious. At the same time, it’s a very reasonable consideration, from Rush’s perspective— he’s dealing with exactly the question of ghosts right now, in that it’s not really clear to him what’s alive and what’s dead, or if dead things stay dead.

What Rush says to Greer about the Nakai is quite dense. It obliquely references what Young thinks about the Telford treats Rush (like he doesn’t care whether Rush hurts or not), the way that Rush repurposed the Zhuangzhi story about the man who dreamt he was a butterfly to be about him and Destiny (the man who dreamt he was a starship), and the AI’s attempted deconstruction of itself into something that couldn’t hurt. There’s just a lot to think about there.

 

**58\. TTBP: Part Five**

The broken Rush in this arc is actually incredibly insightful about his own problems. He, like the city, lacks the good infrastructure that would allow him to manage everything he has to keep under control. (That’s what Young and the AI provide for him.)

The reflection on London in the Blitz is really a bit of a reference to Rose Macaulay’s _The World My Wilderness_ , which is a book with a very interesting young female hero set in London during WW2.

Telford shows up again because Rush is trying not to think about things, and as frequently happens Telford is right. Then Young shows up to keep Rush calm and grounded, and Chloe shows up because Chloe is how he mediates between himself and the Nakai. Rush does start to realize here that these aren’t simply hallucinations, but actually hallucinations that are _doing_ things, allowing him to filter information.

I like Rush admiring the broad-leaved plant’s ambition. (“Fuck you. Don’t tell me where to grow and not to grow.”) That seems extremely Rush to me, and also oddly resonant with the larger themes of the story.

Petershill Drive places Rush as having grown up in the Red Road Flats in Glasgow. No one has piped up to tell me this is unrealistic, so hopefully it’s not.

After Telford shows up again to stop Rush from thinking about the Nakai putting him in a cage, Rush telling him that no one asked for his opinion triggers a memory of a conversation between them that seems to have taken place the second night that Rush used the Tok’ra device with Telford. There are some hints here about Telford and Rush’s past relationship— for instance, that they actually did sleep together once on Icarus, which was after the lab. But most important here is the idea that Young couldn’t possibly love someone as fucked-up as Rush is. _That’s_ the dead land— that idea.

The lefthand stanza that begins “he needs Young” is probably one of my favorite pieces of writing in the story. Aside from the language, I like the characterization of Young carrying his sense of place (really his _house_ , which is literally what he does carry in his head) with him, while Rush is a nervous little animal (as he’s already been characterized by Young) always running away from hunters and getting lost. I also like that we see Young’s role in the cabin for the first time through Rush’s eyes: over and over again Young opens doors for him and invites him in.

And the salient question here: who _is_ Young waiting for? At this point, Rush is really struggling to know who he is, so he can’t be certain that he’s the person Young wants.

“You’re not good at— fuck, I don’t know. Being a thermos or something” makes me laugh so much. And is such a reasonable stab to take at thermoregulation.

Rush telling Greer that his RAM disk loses its stored data with sudden movements is from the original story, but was too good not to keep.

Oh, and then Telford brings up the _real_ fear: that not only does Rush not know what he is, but that _he’s no one_. That, as Rush considered in TTBP Pt. 1, there’s no water left. And there’s some legitimacy to this fear; as I previously commented on, Rush has a very unfixed sense of self because he tends to do and be whatever he has to in order to get what he wants, which is a reasonable response to the kind of life he’s had. So it makes sense to then fear that you aren’t anyone, even _before_ you end up struggling to remember your own name on an alien planet. 

The meditation on percentages is quite a complicated one that really comes out of my academic work. If Rush is one hundred percent him, but missing pieces, then how do we conceptualize the idea that he needs other people to be in the way that he’s been being, and does that make him insufficient on his own (as he fears)?

I love this breakdown that really begins with the slightly William Carlos Williams-inflected “so much depends upon his unsustainable incarnation” and then encounters “black-leaved impulses” and fractures into a “blitz” that lets the Nakai flashback rise to the surface.

Telford’s observation that Rush “has always seemed like someone who had the shit beat out of [him] as a kid” comes from the original story, and always stood out to me as extremely important.

I go back and forth on whether Rush’s aside about his childhood interrupts the flow too much. But I got attached to the idea of his experiences requiring “a special kind of math.”

 

**59\. TTBP: Part Six**

I was so proud of myself for coming up with that description about God having run out of change for color copies.

Greer is, I think, the first and maybe the only person to refer to Rush as Young’s boyfriend.

Rush’s “It’s my body, and I’ll do what I want with it!” is about the potential for him to convert himself to energy, bomb-style, and points towards the showdown with himself that he’ll have about this in the next chapter.

Greer’s thoughts, when they’re hanging onto the wall, about Rush’s experiences with time are pretty interesting. Either or both of these could be true.

It’s a tragedy that Young and Greer never got to hang out and compare notes about all the times that they had to be _so patient_ with Rush doing totally frustrating and/or insane things. It’s _very funny_ to me to imagine the patience Greer is having to exert here when Rush is like, “Where are we?” “What gate?” 

Materiality Watch: it _would_ be tough to deal with physical exertion if the only exercise you’re getting is jogging around the corridors of a spaceship. Differences in ground translate to differences in your body, not to mention issues of gravity and the like. 

I like that Greer understands that when Rush talks about how Chloe’s frightened, he’s talking about himself being frightened. And Greer doesn’t call attention to that; he just goes with it. 

We get some classic Rush I’m-not-a-child, I-don’t-need-your-help-ing here. 

Some profound musings on the nature of trauma from Greer here. He’s already articulated, back in “Six Syllables,” that he understands how traumatized people end up submitting to the same trauma over and over again. And he’s deliberate about refusing that path. But the logic here is still that logic: maybe if you do it enough times, it’ll turn out differently, and you won’t just have _survived_ , but will have _conquered_ it.

 

**60\. TTBP: Part Seven**

IMHO, this and “Brittle Star” are the best chapters of this story. I’m very proud of this chapter’s unity, coherence, and formal execution. It starts with a throwaway adjective from the original story— Cimmerian— and then uses that to paint this picture of the sewer as the place where the dead live. This all comes from the Odyssey, Book 11— Cimmeria is a land of perpetual darkness that Odysseus must pass through to get to the land of the dead, where the ghosts gather around him and speak θεσπεσίῃ ἰαχῇ, which is translated in various ways— it’s definitely with a kind of cry, but sometimes it’s “uncanny,” sometimes it’s “astounding,” and so on. I first encountered the concept of θεσπεσίῃ ἰαχῇ years ago, in a study of Greek and Roman ghost beliefs, and became somewhat obsessed with it, so it presented itself readily for inclusion here.

This takes Rush’s fear of the water, which has very rational and real-world roots, and re-characterizes it as something that has another level: he is afraid of the dead or buried things that lurk under the surface, that he’s repressed but can’t ever quite get rid of; he’s afraid of getting pulled down by them; he’s afraid of their power to contaminate. 

“Young” here tells Rush it’s okay not to be human, but Rush knows that the real Young has more problems with this idea.

I find this discussion of Rush trying to be human quite significant. It builds on earlier ideas about this that particularly come from Chloe, who’s maybe been most articulate about the struggle to be human, and how much energy it takes. Not being human takes on a connotation of not being _normal_ , not displaying “normal” behavior. 

Telford, as usual, is both cruel and correct here: Rush doesn’t change, because obliterating oneself and making a new self is different from having to go through the painful process of growing. And even though Young says that’s not true, his answer is more focused on the idea that Rush doesn’t have to feel guilty for that, because he’s just been trying to survive his whole life, and has never really had the opportunity to do anything else. 

Telford’s cruelest comment here— that Gloria understood Rush best at the moment when he abandoned her— comes from the original story.

Telford _doesn’t_ always tell the truth (and it’s an open question as to whether being cruel and correct is the same thing as telling the truth), and Young is right to point this out now.

Greer and Rush connecting here over the revelations of their abusive childhoods comes from the original story, though I’ve written/formatted it a bit differently. I particularly like the fragmented flashbacks on the lefthand side— “he didn’t have this part of his body that other people had” in some ways connects to Telford’s interlude, where he talks about “the missing piece.” I imagine Telford as having had a not-dissimilar background.

I think that “he had been aware of her love for her family though he had been unclear on its etiology” is one of the truest ways I’ve ever found to describe a particular experience. 

Oh, I lied, Telford’s previous comment wasn’t the cruelest; the cruelest is “I suppose you did send her back in the end,” which actually makes Rush fall apart.

“He is not easily classified and he is very cold and very wet” is an incredibly _me_ line because its combination of unlikely things or things that aren’t really supposed to go together is quite funny? But the idea of Rush not being easily classified is actually a key observation on several levels.

This Rush isn’t supposed to know who Riley is. He isn’t supposed to remember that conversation. But he does. Maybe that was in the data that the ship dumped in his head, or maybe he’s just naturally mixing with AI!Rush, as in the dream. It confuses him here.

On the left, we get to the second reference to Rush never having asked Telford why Telford did what he did. And the idea here is that it was natural to him that this was how people behaved to one another— “the human condition is contractual,” and in a sense, anyway, he had signed himself over to Telford in order to try to escape from himself.

“It’s my body” references here— the ultimate in autonomy is, I suppose, self-destruction, which is what Rush is considering here: turning himself into a nuclear weapon as a giant fuck-you to the Nakai, refusing to let them _do_ anything to him and instead doing something to himself. The idea that this is what he had always dreamed about— I suspect that Rush, who is already quite an angry person, spent a _long_ time having to suppress a _tremendous_ amount of rage. In part he would do this in order to survive, because he was small and weak and other people had control over him; in part, I think, it was in order to be _civilized_ , and to prove that he was better than the people who raised him. So to let that rage and that pain out, to actually see it have a real, physical effect in the world, would seem like the most incredible liberation. 

But Chloe offers him another means of doing that here, one that _doesn’t_ result in total self-destruction: he can literally weaponize that rage and pain, turning it into a means of psychic destruction. That’s why Telford switches from being someone whose job is to suppress all of this negative emotion to being someone whose job is to _provoke_ it. He moves into the left-hand side of Rush’s consciousness and deliberately brings up Rush’s most traumatic memories, so that Rush can dredge up and release all of that agony, killing the Nakai with it.

An earlier draft of Chapter 13, with its memory of Rush in the laboratory, had a flashback to Gloria and Rush on the beach at Aldeburgh. I cut it, because it wasn’t quite working, but it was always part of my history for them: that Gloria had been performing at the Aldeburgh Festival and told him there that she’d decided not to undergo treatment. I have an obsession with Britten, and the monument to him on the beach is a giant metal scallop with a quotation from _Peter Grimes_ that is perhaps a bit troubling as a choice for the sculpture but very apropos here, where Rush is submitting himself to the “voices” that refuse to be drowned, voices that represent all the wrongs he feels he’s done, all the most terrible things in his life.

Rush’s inability to admit that he wishes his parents were dead is, I think, fairly familiar to anyone who has had a difficult home life.

And the key here: that Rush wants agency (to win), but more than that he wants to not be the person that any of these things happened to. As Telford says, that’s not possible. But Young offers him one possible solution.

And he releases that rage and pain in this ghost-language that is inhuman. 

This is really in some ways the first part of “Brittle Star,” because it begins what that chapter finishes. There is “someone or something” inside of him here that wants to live, but it’s not until “Brittle Star” that he is able to identify and claim that as himself— be an I that wants to live instead of a person that something else wants to live.

 

**61\. TTBP: Part Eight**

This chapter is something of an afterthought to the last one, but it sort of can’t be helped. I worried a lot about that when I was writing it. But ultimately Greer isn’t going through the same kind of intense personal journey that Rush is here, and while I tried to give him an arc of some kind, Rush’s moment of catharsis was always going to take precedence.

But, well, you do get the idea of Greer turning himself into a Terminator and kicking Rush’s ass in computer heaven. And his reflections on amphiumas, which are gross awful eel fish. _And_ the “What do you think the Nakai eat? Not people. Probably. _Probably_ ,” which for some reason I find hilarious.

Can’t you just see Young as a camp counselor, running some kind of wilderness program for delinquent kids. 

Greer knows that Rush isn’t coming back to Earth, but he kind of just sidesteps that issue for the moment.

I struggled a lot with the dialogue in this section, but it seemed to get easier after I came up with the idea of Greer talking to Rush like Rush was the computer from Star Trek. I think it was easier because it was funny? Funny and tragic— just how I like it.

I was very interested in the idea of this Nakai treasure trove, and in the idea— which comes up here, and then in one of Rush’s nightmares, later— that it could easily seem like Rush is another piece of broken technology that Greer is shoving in there. Because he sort of _is?_ Like, that might be how he would conceptualize himself. 

The “someplace nice,” hearkening back to Rush and Young’s conversation about going to Hawaii, is quite sad.

When Greer thinks that it’s “easy to go crazy with this stuff”— I think that’s very true, and for the reasons Greer gives. You can’t model yourself on other people, and you don’t have a lot of others to look at for reassurance and stability. 

I thought for a long time about what I wanted Greer’s final inspiring moment here to be. It seemed to me that it’s very important to him that he be treated like a human being, which is probably why he dislikes Telford so much. It makes sense: his childhood was terrible and isolating, and I think he’s probably worked very hard for his human-being-ness. And he won’t let that be taken from him. Here, he’s gesturing towards some quality that isn’t necessarily specific to human beings, and is hard to define; Rush suggests (with a gesture that echoes his uncertainty about whether or not he was the shuttle) that he’s not a human being, but Greer doesn’t think that matters. 

I _like_ the ending of this chapter, but I don’t _love_ it. Oh, well. 

 

**Chapter 62**

Back to the adventures of Young and the AI! The AI is definitely feeling a bit clingy, and has perhaps picked up the habit of being contrary from Rush. 

When we start to get into the important nitty-gritty of Young’s conversation with the AI, there’s some stuff about parts and wholeness that points towards my central obsession with these things: Rush is a whole person; he’s not just a part. The AI is actually addressing one of Young’s chief fears here, but neither one of them realizes it. When Young spoke to 30%!Rush in the interface, he said that everything left of Rush would be part of AI!Rush, which he saw as Rush being turned into a part. But the AI is saying here that Rush is not that. BTW, I recommend Sara Ahmed’s book _Willful Subjects_ for some academic analysis of parts.

I worked for a long time on the AI’s speech about being alone. It draws a little bit on an academic paper I wrote that engaged in the same serious wordplay about part-ness and apart-ness. I don’t think I can distill it down more precisely than I do in that speech.

It was important to me that Young forget that the AI was the AI, even though he wasn’t thinking of it as Sheppard. So when he extends his hand to it, he’s treating it as a person: because he assumes he can touch it, and because he’s _extending a hand_ to it, which is a gesture of connection between people. 

I went back while writing this DVD commentary and wrote a tiny new chunk into a later scene in this chapter because it bothered me so much that Telford showed up here and originally did nothing. Which he does in the original story, to be fair! And I love writing Telford, because he says so many clever, nasty things— as he does here, with the line about fidelity not being Rush’s strong suit (like… fuck, dude) and then the “one-note revision” that changes Rush’s tune from “Fuck off, David” to… well, you get the idea. But to start with, there wasn’t a reason for him to be here.

That chunk of Ancient, which is justRush’s thoughts from TTBP Pt. 7, was quite a journey of translation. I violently dislike periphrastic constructions in Latin!!!!!!!! They make me feel blurry on the inside.

In the next scene, between Young and the AI in the infirmary, there’s quite an interesting line in which Young says that often when Rush lies, he’s just trying to make the world the way he wishes it was. This is also what Young has done in the past, really, with policing language.

This is another scene where the AI is a lot like a child: “There is a rule.” “Why is it how the world works?”

A Very True Thing that Young says is that when you hurt that much, it’s hard to know what you want. “Mostly you just want it to stop hurting.”

And a key but perhaps too buried revelation: One way of understanding “better” is “in less pain.”

So the next scene is the one where I added a bit to the beginning: Telford showing up and trying to get Young to let him take command. Now it lays some groundwork for the issue of Rush’s statement to the SGC, and also builds a little more towards Rush’s sudden yet inevitable betrayal. It also allows me to build out the tension a little bit more, and accentuates Young fleeing to the gate room: he needs to get to Rush (or the possibility of Rush) so badly that he’s willing to leave Telford in command. 

I like Rush’s stuttering fragmented thoughts when he comes through the gate, and in retrospect I wish I had used more stuttering in some of the thought-fragments before that. 

I needed the last paragraph of this chapter to be exceptionally strong, and I hope it got there. There are a few elements that I think stand up: the idea of Young wanting his hands never to depart from the place where Rush liked them to rest, and the idea that now time is unmeasurable for _Young_ in this instant. 

 

**Chapter 63**

This chapter was quite different in the original story, because there Rush refused to acknowledge Young and the AI’s existence on account of not thinking they were real. I wanted Rush to not think they were real, but not be able to prevent himself from clinging to Young. I suspect this has to do with my focus on materiality.

Poor Rush— he’s trying to figure out what’s going on, and the AI is like, “You’re not an arm or an FTL drive,” as though he’s supposed to understand that at all.

It was important to me that Rush still be relying on Greer as his barometer of reality. Also, Greer _does_ treat Rush like a child, but he kind of gets away with it because he’s not condescending— he’s just matter-of-fact.

I wanted to have Rush’s moment of panic have to do with the fact that ship didn’t feel alive to him. This connects to TTBP sections in which we saw that his understanding of animacy is extremely non-normative. So it would be extremely upsetting to him if the ship seemed dead.

In the next scene, Rush has built on his earlier fear that Young’s love for him is too implausible to be real— that it could only be a Nakai trick designed to hurt him. There’s something particularly awful about this to me— I feel like this is what he fears most to begin with, that he’ll allow himself to want something only to have it snatched away. 

Young, wisely, adopts Greer’s technique of Rush-management.

In the original story, Young reads a letter from his brother in this chapter. But my Young seemed more likely to be avoiding reading letters from his family. This hearkens back to the dream he had ages ago in which he realized that all his letters were addressed to someone else, a dream that was transparently about coming out. 

I think this is a really difficult and meaningful realization— there are a lot of unrealistic depictions out there of queer characters either winning their families over or having dramatic separations from them. But it’s possible sometimes to quietly realize that the most important parts of your life are never going to be a part of the world you were raised in, and that they will never be something you can share with your family. What does that mean about who you are, and what are your obligations to yourself in that situation? It’s a complicated question, maybe.

Rush saying “I am the most important” always makes me laugh.

I went back and forth on whether the humor of the conversation with the AI worked in this scene. But it was a conversation I loved. In a sense, the AI _is_ their bedroom! That’s a question of materiality, for sure. And the tone of it is so different to previous conversations between Young and the AI, because there’s a level of intimacy there that wasn’t present before Rush crashed. 

For some reason I got very attached to the image of the mind- _stuff_ of Rush trying to latch onto Young from under the floorboards and climb out— the desperation to be together, and the crackling energy of him. 

 

**Chapter 64**

So I started writing this chapter knowing that I wanted to structure it as a series of dreams and Young waking up between them to deal with Rush’s confusion and panic. I wasn’t, at the start, really sure what the dreams were going to be like. It took me a couple of tries before I realized that Rush needed to be able to not find the cabin at first, so that him showing up at the cabin could be a major emotional turning point in the chapter. This also allowed me a greater range of possibilities for the dreams: they weren’t just all “here we are in the cabin, so what happens now.” 

There’s a little bit more detail here on how the cabin keeps changing and expanding. The cabin is such a central part of this story that I can’t believe I ever didn’t imagine it.

Because this chapter is centrally about Rush accepting that Young’s love for him is real, it begins with this question: Why? Why would Young love him? And by the end, that question has to be answered.

My favorite dreams to write were the ones that didn’t need a lot of narrative— they could be, essentially, funny, even in a chapter that’s pretty filled with angst and misery (Young refusing to be a St. Bernard and dressing Rush in a orange-and-green hat with pom poms! Rush heading the wrong direction and refusing to backtrack!) or they could be the flashes of nightmares that Young trudges through.

I also liked writing the endless repetitions of Rush not knowing what’s going on, and how grindingly awful that must be for Young and the AI. Oh, I think in the original story the AI wasn’t even projecting to Rush at this point? So only Young could see it? But at this point the three of them needed to be in this thing together. I had a sense that I wanted to get to the point where Young was comfortable with the AI in their bedroom.

Allow me to congratulate myself on that marble dream: it’s literally _on the nose_ in the sense that the marbles are hitting Young on the face, but it’s also about Rush losing his marbles, at the same time as it’s about the supertask!

“Because I know a better way out of here” — Young’s entire message to Rush.

I also want to congratulate myself on the short passage about Rush not knowing the difference between being held and being held down. Really this chapter plays to my strength: writing very short, very vivid scenes that are dense with meaning. It’s in the longer, action-y, narrative scenes that I go astray.

Oh, and the _stargazing_ scene, which comes up again towards the end because it’s such a beautiful image. Here, of course, it’s also terribly bittersweet for anyone who knows or senses that the end of their time on Destiny is fast-approaching.

A lot of information had to be delivered in the next scene, but I wanted it also to be about the intimacy that’s grown and continues to grow between Young and the AI. (This is the bit where Young realizes that it doesn’t seem strange that the AI’s in bed with them.) The parallels between them grow here, as the AI quotes Young back to him: neither of them can undo what has already taken place, as much as they’d like to, so the only possibility for happiness is a workaround.

Then this turning point of Rush finding the cabin, when Young is compared to a wall— a wall that is holding Rush, in this case (hearkening back to the held/held down distinction).

You can see in the next scene, I think, that Rush is much more with it— enough to wonder where Greer is, and whether Chloe’s all right. But, unfortunately, this means he’s also with it enough to remember things and get confused by them.

I love the AI saying “Nick is freaking out.” There’s something quite unsettling about this scene, though— I think because it starts to cross over into the realm of real disorders? Essentially, Rush is experiencing something similar to Capgras delusion. He can clearly see that the AI is the AI, but it doesn’t _feel_ right to him, so he can’t accept that it is what it says it is.

By _lupus in fabula_ I meant, essentially, “Talk about Rush like he’s a nuclear weapon, and he’ll become a nuclear weapon.”

In the next dream— I wanted Young to enjoy being part-Rush, and I wanted him to talk to Rush about it, because I knew that I wanted him to stay part-Rush in the end. But it was also a nice way to move into this conversation about why Rush is so scared, and why Rush keeps wanting to know _why_. There’s a hint here, also, of Young turning Rush’s own logic back on him (which Rush deserves): Rush doesn’t have to rebuild the foundations of his world if he thinks that Young’s love for him is artificial, just as Young doesn’t have to rebuild the foundations of his world if he thinks that AI!Rush is Rush. This idea of them growing together is a really important one. They _have_ grown together, in the way that trees grow together, in configurations that lead them to support each other. I think Rush has maybe thought of himself as _not changing_ , in a weird way, even though _obviously_ he’s _dramatically_ changing insofar as he’s merged with this starship and become part-Ancient and so forth. He always thought that Young hadn’t changed him; that he wouldn’t let Young change him in the way that he’s afraid he’s changed Young. But Young is so accepting of the idea of change, and so unafraid of it, and it really challenges Rush at the same time as it’s a tremendous relief, because he can allow himself to not feel… guilty, I guess, for having changed and allowed himself to be changed.

The AI’s discussion of crashing and restarting is from the original story. I loved the idea of it being familiar with the experience of crashing and restarting.

The start of this next section is so full of things— I think I tend to characterize Young as the stable, sturdy, foundational one, but here we get Rush as what Young’s house is built on, which has always been the case! So there’s a reciprocity there. 

Parts of this conversation are from the original story— my most significant additions are, of course, the question of what Young was going to say (which Rush finally already knows), and the question of promises (ominous tone).

 

**65\. Second Epithalamium for Augusta Ada Byron**

Chloe gets lost a bit in the whole TTBP arc and its onboard resolution. It’s so much about Rush, first with Greer and then with Young, and Young and the AI having to come to terms, and so forth. But meanwhile Chloe is living with the fear that Rush might have died to protect her, and then with the reality that he’s come back but he’s terribly injured! She really needed to have a nightmare about that, and then to struggle with it. I loved the image of her turning weightless in the dark, like a ballerina.

Have I mentioned that I could write a whole fic that was just Rush and Young bickering while Chloe’s in the room? I think I have, but it bears repeating. They’re like her two eccentric uncles.

I go back and forth on how much I like Chloe’s little monologue about gift exchange. I like it as a piece of writing, but I’m never quite sure if it comes off as a bit too authorial voice? I do think about gift exchange a lot. I went with it because it strikes at something important to the way Rush thinks about the world. 

Oh, the blow of that “not a hundred percent” remark.

Chloe’s wedding ring is an important sort of symbol in this story— on the one hand, it’s about Rush/Young/theAI, but on the other hand, it’s just more generally about transformation and remaking. I like that here it gives the opportunity to introduce the idea that Chloe is afraid of Earth, because in some ways her life is easier when she doesn’t have to confront the “normal” world.

Nice to see, in this next scene, that Rush and Young have kept to their truce: Rush tells Young when he’s leaving, so Young won’t wake up and find him suddenly gone. 

I suspect these Chloe interludes bring out some of the best in my writing. They certainly contain some of the sentences I most admire: “How do I love someone, when I’m a monster? How do I live with someone without destroying them? What if I’m not sure how to be a person? What if I’m not sure what a person is? A very basic curriculum they were working out between them. An evolving heuristic they could apply to their own prodigiousness.” A sequence of sentences I’m astonished by, to be honest. They express exactly what I wanted them to express. And then when Chloe calls Rush out (as she should), the idea of the future as having bodies— I think this is an idea that recurs in my work, possibly? And it slightly came up earlier in TJ’s interlude. But it felt very important.

The next scene: so in the original story, there’s an interlude from Ginn’s perspective where she meets up with Eli, who’s been helping Rush with all this work. But I realized there was actually a lot of potential in Ginn and Chloe meeting, because Ginn had _literally taken over Chloe’s body after she was dead???_ Nothing could be more perfectly suited to Chloe’s ongoing struggles with her sense of agency and embodiment. 

It’s worth noting that Chloe re-articulates here the AI!doctor’s definition of love. I suspect this is a slightly religious definition, in some ways.

Chloe’s paragraph about love (“Love is hard”) probably perfectly articulates Rush’s struggle with love, especially post-Telford, as well as her own struggle. 

I did need Ginn to deliver the information about the iterative bit-rate reduction here, so that Chloe could later deliver it to Young. That was just a piece of business.

Another thing worth noting: “I don’t know where one draws the boundary, after a certain point” is both important in terms of love, but also in terms of how Young and Rush will eventually ascend.

Why does Charades come up so much in this story? I suppose because communication is such a central issue. 

Rush is, in a lot of ways, really speaking to himself when he speaks to Chloe in the passage that begins “You have so much potential.” I think it’s something he wishes that someone had said to him when he could still have internalized it. So much of his struggle comes out of his inability to believe that human interaction is not a transactional arrangement in which someone comes out on top.

The parallels between Rush and Chloe really get emphasized a lot here, don’t they?

So few people in this story are capable of saying that they love each other. At least Young says it to TJ, later.

If I remember correctly, I had wet eyes writing Chloe’s realization that she’ll never get the chance to know this version of Rush, and her realization of how much all of them had lost— “everyone who could have loved him, everyone whose love he’d deserved to have.”

She has quite a simple and effective way of expanding the category of personhood, which I like a lot. 

The ending line here sets up her growth in the last of her epithalamiums.

 

**Chapter 66**

In retrospect, I’m not quite sure how I feel about starting this chapter in medias res. At the time, I was charmed by the idea, and thought that it quickly and effectively made things feel full-on enough that the interruption _felt_ like an interruption. 

There’s a bit of a Hilary Mantel echo in “He couldn’t think of a word to describe what Rush was.” Someone— I think possibly Danton?— gets a similar phrase in _A Place of Greater Safety_. I think it’s something like “He couldn’t think of anything as cold as Camille saying ‘Use him and dispose of him later,’” or similar. I quite often have Mantel phrasings or rhythms from that book rattling around in my head, because I’ve read it about two hundred times, probably.

This argument lays bare Rush’s modus operandi: “He _hurt_ you.” “I hurt myself.” 

This is actually quite a complicated argument, because Rush _did_ know what he was doing, and he did use Telford for his own purposes; the most objectionable thing Telford did is not the thing he’s being charged with. The extent to which Telford manipulated Rush versus Rush manipulated Telford is not really clear. Of course, in general Telford manipulated Rush quite a lot, and also helped to create Rush-as-manipulator, but that’s not actually what’s being judged in this situation.

Once again, Rush levels the charges against himself before someone else can— and his description of himself here (cold-hearted, scheming, remorseless, etc) comes back at the climax.

So the original story had date stamps that placed it in the early part of 2011, and the DADT repeal didn’t roll out until September of that year, meaning that _technically_ Telford could have used Young’s relationship with Rush against him if he chose to make an issue of it. I thought that Telford probably had several levels of strategy: he wanted to take Young down for his bad decisions, but he’d also use Rush against him if he had to (since Telford was brainwashed during his original relationship with Rush, Young wouldn’t be able to use _that_ against _him_ ), and then, if he had to, admit to sleeping with Rush himself and spin it as an attempt to save the ship. Using sexual misconduct against Young would be particularly effective because he has a track record of making terrible sexual decisions (with TJ).

In Young’s experience of Rush healing TJ, there’s more of that reciprocity of support: where normally Young is the one who acts as/provides the house for Rush to live in, here there’s a reminder that Rush is actually holding the walls of Young’s mind up. 

I’m never quite sure how a conversation qualifies for the Bechdel test; Chloe has a couple of conversations with other women throughout this story that are about _her_ , obviously so, but mention men. This conversation, though, is one that doesn’t mention men at all. And I liked the idea of her being able to turn to TJ to talk about things that she might not talk about with a man, even Rush. This is just such a normal, almost trivial conversation, and for Chloe that’s quite meaningful, because she doesn’t get to have many conversations that are just— not girl talk, exactly, but getting to talk to another woman about planning her wedding. And I think she really craves that.

I thought a lot about how angry Young was or wasn’t going to get at Rush about Rush secretly healing TJ, and whether Young was actually going to block Rush out at all (as he does in the original story). It was such a big deal for Young and Rush to be blocked at all while Rush was recovering. But I think that Rush has managed to hit Young in a lot of Young’s weak spots here (as Young says— Telford and TJ), and Young still has this slight (reasonable!) fear that Rush is going to pull the rug out from under him. 

I had planned all the locations of the sex scenes far in advance, because each one had to advance the plot in some way or serve a purpose. I knew that Rush and Young had to sleep together here, because it was going to be the last time. That’s why Rush is so insistent, and so unusually vulnerable, and why there’s sort of an additional layer of intimacy between them, when they’re cradled together and becoming one person.

I just had to put in the kicker there of Young only just beginning to realize how enormous his feelings for Rush are, and how they’re still growing and changing. I always opt for maximum devastation.

I knew that there had to be a final dream in the cabin, and I had always wanted Rush to leave Young with a message on the piano. At the time I wrote this, I was planning to have Young puzzle over the message later, but that never seemed to work out. Now I’m not sure if the dream quite works. The idea was supposed to be that Rush is playing his feelings for Young on the piano, and they’re too complicated to ever render in words. But I’m not sure if that comes across.

The last scene is mostly a chance to deliver information (a lot of the dialogue comes from the original story, although it’s Eli there and not Chloe), but it also emphasizes that Young is still not sure how he feels about the AI!Rush situation, and that AI!Rush and Rush are sure that _they_ know how Young feels about them.

Then, at the end, Rush’s “I know you” parallels Young’s “I know you” at the end of chapter 26, and ties into the larger theme of knowing.

 

**Chapter 67**

The first scene is an edited and punched-up version of the scene from the original story.

Not so the next! I thought Young’s reflection on the nature of happiness was quite important, and ties into what Rush and AI have discussed about making the best of things when parameters can’t be changed. It does no good to view one as being unhappy because one can’t access the entire range of universes; one can be happy in the range of possibilities that one has.

I’m very proud of this philosophical exchange between Young and Rush here— Young’s realization that it _is_ true that Rush can accept all of these extraordinary things happening, but it’s simply not possible for him to accept that he doesn’t deserve to hurt. Sometimes that can’t be changed. It’s too hard-wired. And Rush’s explanation is me trying to explain something I feel very strongly about. I think it came out right. And what Rush says about not being unmade by change is also important, and perhaps something that he too has struggled to come to terms with.

I knew I wanted to have more scenes with Telford, because he’s been such a significant character in the fic. And I figured that he’s the one who would object most strongly to what he’s figured out about this plan— he’s the one whose whole project was to access Destiny and take control of it, and it’s also strongly implied that this was _not_ to give Stargate Command an advantage, but so that he would be in a position of personal power, possibly with the Lucian Alliance. But, of course, Rush (and ascension) was also his project, so he would object strongly to “losing” Rush. Of course, Young and Telford predictably get into a battle of who can be the most unpleasant— and every time they confront each other, Rush ends up being reduced to weapon or bargaining chip between them. Which is why it’s particularly satisfying (I hope) that Rush, for once, ends up having the upper hand, and throwing Telford’s machinations back in his face by having this tidy little piece of blackmail set up with Greer. 

But he’s still obviously affected by what Telford’s said, either about him not being able to ascend, or about his background, or with the insinuation that he’d whored himself out for information. 

Here, Young is once more the boundary that keeps Rush contained in a comforting way.

I’m not sure the scenes with TJ and the AI are as effective as they could be, but they needed to not be _so_ emotional yet, because there’s so much build-up of emotion that’s going to happen in this chapter. I do like Young calling the AI a hypocrite, which it clearly is.

I _do_ like this last little scene with Telford, because it’s one final instance of Telford being awful but right. 

If you read carefully, the moment when TJ shows up is when Greer steals the syringe from her to give to Rush.

I do like TJ and Young’s goodbye, because it’s one of the few times when someone admits love. And I do think Young loves her. They’ve been through a lot together, and she’s been there to save and support him.

Are Brody and Volker MBMBAM fans? Possibly, but only through time travel, I suppose.

Rush is terrible at goodbyes, so it was quite difficult to write him saying goodbye to Greer and Chloe. He and Greer had shared so much without ever really speaking about it— down to the fact that Greer is the one who’s helped him arrange to force Young to leave the ship— and I felt like Greer would want to speak to that. And Rush can’t speak, but can kind of communicate, anyway, how much he wants Greer to conquer the things they’re both struggling with and have a happy life. 

Then with Chloe— they had really said their goodbyes already. “Everything and nothing” is a bit of a reference to the marble problem that has linked them. I just wanted this to be tremendously emotional without anything really being said, and I think it succeeds?

Now we begin the Devastation. This was very delicate to get right. I wanted it to be absolutely cruel to the reader, unbearably difficult to suffer through. Rush’s condemnation of himself is awful, his conviction that he is the scorpion and that Telford was right is also, his conviction that Young will stop loving him is awful, and it’s awful that Young reaches, too late, this ability to express that there are things that are the opposite of scars— _good_ things that mark you, and that will never go away. It’s just all awful! Obviously! I don’t know what to say about it.

 

**Chapter 68**

This is one of my favorite chapters in the story. The title is in part a reference to Karen Barad’s writings about brittlestars and their challenging embodiment/ontology, and in part a reference to the AI having described stars in a way that resembled Rush. 

The idea of Rush sending papers through the gate comes from the original story, as does the AI’s line about “I also believe that Chloe should go to graduate school,” which was so perfect that I had to keep it. 

The idea that “no organism in nature would inflict this [pain] on itself” hints at Rush-and-Young’s oneness, as Rush thinks a little bit further down that he can’t do this to Young because “no organism in nature would,” implying that Young is part of himself. 

I knew as soon as I wrote the dog tags in that Rush was going to intend to send them back and not be able to do so.

“…because now there is no other way for him to measure time.” Ouch. No more heartbeats.

Part of the dialogue about Young loving Rush comes from the original story— the idea that the AI tells Rush that Young loves him, and that if he leaves the AI here, Young might still love him. But Rush, of course, is incapable of leaving people behind. Except— I noted this previously— that in a way he’s done exactly that to Young, which given how pathological his inability to leave people is, could potentially be read as a positive thing— that he’s broken this pattern that’s really a product of the trauma of losing Gloria, and he’s made a choice that’s not purely driven by traumatic reaction.

The AI also turned into Young in the original story, but I took a slightly different approach to the ambiguity of Rush confessing his love to this figure that’s both Young and the AI.

This massive paragraph of Destiny becoming Rush was entirely written to Brian Eno’s “The Big Ship,” if you want The Authentic Experience, and I’m tremendously proud of it. It had to be disordered but intelligible; it had to consist of recognizable fragments that would carry emotional weight with the audience; it had to be a summary of Rush’s life, both good and bad, and it had to begin to fracture apart towards the end. Incredibly, I didn’t plan that last sort of wordplay, where Young’s question about why it isn’t enough for Young to want Rush (which itself echoes the AI’s question, in chapter 13, about why it’s not enough for Rush to have been loved) breaks down into this stuttering of “ever” that turns into the truncated cry of Young’s name.

I was very moved by the idea of the AI existing in him not only as structure, but as the love that he’s never been able to feel for himself. 

In the original story, there was no scene of Rush trying to ascend. But I knew that I needed to do something different because of the shape of Rush’s arc here. I mean, when I say “I knew”— none of the rest of this was planned; it was written as it came to me, in one sitting, based on what seemed natural from line to line. 

Materiality Watch: the ship as Rush’s body, which he moves through. 

I simply couldn’t accept the idea of ascension as about acceptance, this sort of very thin cod-Buddhist-written-by-non-Buddhists understanding of what it means to achieve higher understanding of life. I believe that desire is important. Desire is a form of movement, a form of growth, a not-being-still that’s an integral part of existence. (If you’re a Deleuzian, I suppose it’s more than that also.) Desire is a reaching-forwards and a connection to the rest of the world. Here, what saves Rush is the revelation that _he wants to live_ – for himself, not for anyone else; so that he can be part of that reaching-forwards into the future. That it is good to live, because life is full of potential. While he’s insisted previously that he does feel that way, this is the first time that it really seems to be something that he feels, that he can honestly put in the first person. 

Part of that revelation _is_ a form of acceptance: an acceptance that through all of the different people and things he’s been, he has always been Nicholas Rush. This is what TTBP Pt. 7 was leading to: that whole arc was about him trying to figure out who he was, in the most literal sense, over and over, and accepting that constantly erasing himself was never going to allow him to escape the traumatic things that had happened to him. To affirm, here, that _he is Nicholas Rush_ is to put aside the attempts to obliterate himself that have characterized his existence, and still say to himself what “Young” said to him on the planet: “You’ll never stop being that person. But—“ he can still be loved, but he can still be happy, but he can still be someone of value. He can grow, and change, and not have to rid himself of the terrible things that happened to him.

It was especially important to me that he not do this _for Young_ , although I do think, as Rush later says, that Young brought him to this lesson. He had to do it for himself. And he does. 

 

**Chapter 69**

Now we embark on a three-chapter section that I had planned fairly meticulously, and that was extremely well-suited to my writing style, which, again, tends to be better when I’m writing short, dense little chunks of scenes. In the original story, there were two chapters of Young-on-Earth, and they were short, dense, chunks of scenes, but pretty much all different short chunks of scenes. I went in and significantly restructured everything that happened, because I wanted Young to have a whole chapter in Atlantis, and I wanted the conclusion of the story to take place at Chloe’s wedding.

@alwaysalreadyangry had posted the Francis Ponge poem about flowers on Tumblr, and I became entranced with it. It seemed thematically suited to the story, and I liked the idea of Chloe reading it. 

Because I really like minimalist writing, I fell into these terse little scenes with the psychiatrist where Young would, essentially, refuse to answer, but inadvertently suggest a huge amount through his non-answers. 

I LOVE this scene with Chloe, where I first introduce the idea of her being monitored by the SGC. It made sense to me that there was no way they’d simply let her loose into the world: she’d been genetically altered and subjected to alien mental control! And she demonstrably wasn’t “free” of alien influence insofar as she had retained elements of that transformation. Her paragraph about this— about the destabilizing uneasiness of change— is pretty interesting and accurate, I think. 

“‘No one monitors Godzilla,’ she said after a while.” is one of my favorite lines in this story.

Oh, the potential interpretations of that conversation about homosexuality. “Not happy, or not married?” Then the mention of the dog tags. 

Young is echoing Sheppard, here: living in the same apartment complex, and later using Sheppard’s phrase: “The rest of my life.”

The structure of the conversation with Greer is taken from the original story, but in the original story Young and Rush have a much less significant emotional and sexual connection, so it’s very easy for Young to plausibly doubt that Rush cared about him. Here I have Rush have written a letter to Telford, which digs into Young’s major weakness and reminds him of the Telford-centric betrayals.

My sense is that Rush told Greer everything that happened with Telford, in detail. He knew he would never see Greer again, and he knew that Greer (a) _would_ understand, as Greer says here, because Greer knows what it is to be fucked-up, and (b) was fiercely loyal to Rush and would never tell anyone. Rush probably didn’t even have the awareness that Greer shows here about why, exactly, he was able to do that— I think that as much as Greer rags on therapists he got assigned to, he’s probably actually benefited some from therapy. And what he says here is really true, especially when he essentially says that Telford was familiar to Rush and thus easy to deal with, while Young wasn’t. 

We see a bit of Young-as-Rush surfacing here, in “How infinitely valuable Dr. Jackson’s opinion is,” and later when Young echoes Rush’s thoughts on mountains. 

The scene with Landry is important not only for technical reasons of plot advancement, I think, but because it emphasizes that Young has just had the most significant, tremendous, definitive event of his entire life, and everyone else treats it as this embarrassing blip that he just has to get past.

Sheppard’s right. Lorne was a square. And I fully believe that Sheppard is a math whiz but can’t punctuate emails. 

Young-as-Rush’s thoughts on work arise from my own.

I thought that Chloe would have an especially hard time on Earth, and I liked the idea of her developing a connection to Young because of this. 

My parents, who grew up in small cities in Texas, did not try Indian food until they were in their fifties (and then only at the nagging of their cosmopolitan daughters), so it seems very possible to me that Young might never have eaten it. Writing this scene sent me into a gulab jamun spiral.

“Miss Armstrong, please unburden me of the impression that you believe us to be at war with polar bears” is a characteristic Me line, in that it’s both extremely absurd and very tragic in context.

I love the ambiguity of the “you” in the next little short scene. Who is dead? Who is not real?

The first of Young’s terrible, desolate, soul-destroying dreams is okay, but I don’t think it’s as good as the second one, which I’m immensely proud of. God! The idea of the road as a type of scream that only land can propagate! “The inarticulate earth of his own desolation”! I worked hard to try and make the first dream better, but it was just never going to measure up, and I was distracted while I was writing it by trying to figure out if Joanna Newsom had misled me with her definitions of meteorite/meteor/meteoroid, which I’m pretty sure she did. Joanna! Why must you betray me like this?

I shed a few tears over Young’s destruction of the cabin. Imagine me sitting at my computer, watching YouTube videos of people destroying pianos, and then weeping as I wrote Young tearing apart this place that I had, without realizing it, grown immensely emotionally attached to. It’s _so_ brutal, and conveys so much pain.

 

**Chapter 70**

In the original story, Young goes to Atlantis for a couple of weeks and gets injured on his first mission. But I had known from the start that when my Young went to Atlantis, he was going to end up in this terrible self-destructive relationship with Sheppard, and I needed that to take place over a couple of months. I also wanted to explore what the experience of Atlantis would be like for this Young who was now part-Rush. I tried a couple of openings before I stumbled onto the idea of Young shorting out the city, which I liked a lot. I’ve always opted to interpret the pilot episode of SGA as _Sheppard_ waking up the city rather than just everyone, because I like the idea of Atlantis responding to Sheppard’s presence. 

Sheppard’s kind of a hard character to write, especially if you’re writing him on the slightly more remote, alien side. But I think the “Hey, you break it, you brought it” line does a lot of work— it’s very much something he would say. 

In the original story, there’s a reference later to Young being surprised that Jackson has to wait for an elevator, because he’s so used to seeing the AI as Jackson. So I slightly repurposed that to have Young be surprised by Sheppard here. 

“Really, he had never been in better shape” is the type of short, cutting line that I like to write. Because it’s obvious that Young is, in fact, _completely fucked up_ and refusing to admit it to himself.

One of the first exchanges I dreamt up for this chapter was the “You too, huh?”/“I don’t know how you get any sleep around here.”/“Well, I do know one good way” one. I knew that was how Young and Sheppard would end up sleeping together.

There was an earlier draft of this sex scene that was very different, where Sheppard was a lot more talkative and confident. But it didn’t feel right. They needed to not talk too much to each other, though I still managed to work in what I think and hope are some Sheppard-y lines. 

I really needed a way for Sheppard to forcefully remind Young of the AI, so that Young is sort of aware and not-aware simultaneously that in some sense he’s just slept with the AI, which completely tears apart his entire shell of avoidance and refusing-to-think-about-it, so that he falls apart and has a panic attack in the shower.

I wanted to put in these emails from Chloe as a way to keep Chloe in the story, as a way to show Young’s Rush-ness coming through, and as a sort of desperate reaching-out that he’s engaged in, even as he denies in the most transparently false way possible that anything’s wrong. The denials contrast well, I think, with the scenes of him fucking himself up as much as possible.

“I always wished I could touch you” = gut punch. This is part of why I wanted to build up Young’s relationship with the AI on the ship, have that intimacy and element of… not really _sexual_ attraction, but companionship between by the end, where Young did want to be able to touch the AI to comfort it and be comforted by it. Because I think it adds to his grief here, and amplifies the self-destructiveness of his behavior.

I’m still not quite sure about the sex scene with Sheppard; I think I wanted Young to be trying to achieve a certain level of intimacy that he was desperate for and that he thought maybe he could get through this particular kind of sex, and I wanted to show how much he couldn’t care about anything at this point, that he really had no reaction to being penetrated by another man. I was probably trying to deliberately write against normativity here a little bit, showing that there’s no inherent intimacy to penetrative sex. But I’m not sure how much any of that comes across.

But I do like Sheppard’s speech after, about being married to Atlantis. He is, of course, talking about Young in addition to Atlantis. “They made it so it could be alone” also references the AI’s speech about Rush— “He made me something that could be parted,” which is also true of Young.

And then in the next scene, Young is talking to Atlantis, but also to Rush. There’s a slight reference here, perhaps, to the AI!doctor not being able to scream, having no way to get the pain out of his body. 

The last email to Chloe in this chapter is extremely Rush; note the BrE spelling/language.

The first part of this next scene largely comes from the original story, though I couldn’t resist making up some political factions for the Genii. How great is the play on words you end up with if you call one the “Radimer faction”? (There’s a Genii character called Ladon Radim.) And I don’t know what the Atom Cult is, but it sounds amazing.

I don’t know where the idea of the whistling/singing bullets came from, except that there’s a lot of emphasis in this story on machines having voices and making music, and so it really appealed to me. 

The line about the pain being a “bright hot gnawing animal” is perhaps slightly stolen from (or a reference to) _Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell_, where I believe after Childermass gets shot he pictures his pain as a little fox? This didn’t occur to me till later.

A few things happen at the end here: Young is unclear on whether Sheppard is Sheppard or the AI, and then Young is also clearly suicidal, as has been hinted at; he more-or-less wants to die.

“Where’s Nick?” = gut punch.

And again, at the very end here, Sheppard is talking about both Young and Atlantis. I liked this confusion of them a lot, because it’s something that happened so much with Rush— Rush talking about himself through talking about other objects or hallucinations (the shuttle, “Chloe,” etc). 

One thing I think I wanted to get across in this entire chapter is that Sheppard and Young genuinely like and to some extent care for each other, and I think in a different situation might have had a successful relationship. But that’s just not possible for them right now, because Young is _so_ fucked-up, and Sheppard, who is, as he acknowledges, fucked-up in his own way, can’t do the tremendous amount of work it would take to even begin to try to put Young back together. I like Sheppard a lot, and I think in the beginning I imagined them having a slightly less horrible and bleak time as lovers, but where Young ended up… it just couldn’t be that.

 

**Chapter 71**

I felt very pleased about the “Nice to know we’re picking up exactly where we left off” comment, which works on a meta level as well as in the story— the Atlantis trip was essentially an interlude, and we _are_ , in fact, picking up where we left off.

This Jackson scene mostly comes from the original story. But I had already decided, a while back, that Young was going to inherit all of Gloria’s money

I spent a fair amount of time on Google Maps picking a place for Chloe and Matt to live. Vallejo is sort of midway between Berkeley and Travis AFB.

The idea of Matt getting into cooking amused me, and it seemed to me that he sort of… wouldn’t _notice_ that it wasn’t very gender-normative, at least for someone in the Air Force? I feel like one of the refreshing things about Matt is that he’s kind of a bro, but he’s not particularly hemmed in by other people’s ideas. If someone brought up the idea that Chloe ought to be cooking for him, he’d probably just look confused and say, “Why? She’s a terrible cook.”

Hospitals do have a remarkable effect on people, which Chloe articulates here. They interpellate one as a patient. (Is that the right grammar of interpellate? I ought to know that.) I had to have a tilt-table test done a few years ago, because I have extremely low blood pressure and kept passing out, and it was an extremely routine test, but I had to be hooked up to an IV and things. And I began to feel both completely stripped of agency and as though there were something very breakable about my body. As though I were sick in some way I hadn’t realized yet. 

Probably I was working out a lot of my discontents through Chloe, because I also felt extremely old and over-experienced when I started graduate school. I’d had a lot of strange real-world experiences, and suddenly I was sitting around a table with people who’d done the straight high school—> undergrad—> grad school route (I also dropped out of my undergrad three times and finished in seven years) or had just led very sheltered lives.

Chloe’s situation here is so complicated. Because she wants Rush back, but she doesn’t want Young to be Rush, but she kind of does, but she doesn’t want Young to _hurt_ , and she doesn’t think Rush is dead, but she’s afraid he is. 

Matt would never say she was stupid, of course, but she has that terribly self-critical streak.

And there we get the “rest of my life” echo of Sheppard, which also suggests that Young is not imagining that the rest of his life is going to last very long. 

I really wanted Young to also _try_ to explore his sexuality a little on Earth; this is not a story where he’s gay-for-Rush. And gayness is not just being attracted to men; there are different cultural experiences of it, shared references in communities, histories, literatures. It’s difficult for Young here because he’s come out so late, and he’s still quite uncomfortable with himself in some ways. So he doesn’t really know how to _be_ gay. But I like very much the way I articulated what amazes and maybe overwhelms him about the Castro, which I think is something that a lot of people notice— the material (!) experience of it as a place where men touch each other. 

At the same time, what Young is dealing with is not just a coming-out crisis. He _hasn’t_ just lost his lover. He’s been in this whole other state of existence that’s been torn from him. And it was so singular that nothing can replace it.

There’s a scene in the original story where Young goes to Rush’s house, and another scene where he plays the piano, but both of them are quite different to this.

I really liked the idea of Rush having been one of Gloria’s orchids, and of having liked that. I think it says a lot about the way Rush conceptualized their relationship, because I don’t think Gloria was being serious, but I think Rush took it seriously. And of course there starts to be a bit of slippage there between Young and Rush— Young remembering events as though they were his.

The rather throwaway reflection that the Bechstein was one of the few things the ambiguous “he” had ever allowed Gloria to buy for him is actually quite an important articulation of Rush’s ideas about relationships. Love is an unreliable reason to buy something, and the value of the gift might thus be levied against him in the future, used to manipulate him or punish him, but if there’s a practical reason— a practical benefit to Gloria— then it’s acceptable, because it’s not really _given to him._ That’s what I mean when I talk about relationships as “transactional.”

For some reason that anecdote also has a faint echo for me of ivory chessmen that Peter Wimsey buys for Harriet Vane in _Gaudy Night_ , although of course the whole point of that gift is that it’s _not_ practical.

I love the Chopin piece that Young plays here. I find it quite haunting. It always sounds like it’s being played from the past. 

I wanted Young to give Greer some of the money, but the scene with Greer also allowed me to introduce the idea of Young leaving the service, and have Young display some more Rush-like characteristics. 

The “he left me” bit is a bit of fancy design-work where it’s Young talking about Rush, and really accurately breaking down the way Rush tends to arrange things, but doing it in Rush’s voice, with Rush’s British English terms. Perhaps Young is also displaying Rush’s tendency to protect himself by saying things that he knows aren’t quite true. 

The original story has a scene where Young goes to his family’s house for Christmas and talks with JD, but it’s very different. It was important to me that Young come out; he has never actually, in this entire story, identified himself as gay, queer, not-straight, anything. And while I don’t think that’s _necessary_ , I think it’s an important step _for him_ , because he’s struggled so much with the process of acknowledging his own desires. And this is a coming-out in some other ways, as well; it’s him trying to explain that he’s a different person now. 

_Would_ you believe that I actually did insta-research on what a realistic amount of money for Young to have inherited from Gloria would be. It’s surprisingly difficult to find out! So I settled on something around a million dollars. You can decide for yourself whether that was before or after selling her no-doubt-extraordinarily-valuable violin and the house. Actually, given that the house was in the SF Bay area, probably that amount would have doubled if he sold the house.

Anyway. There’s a gentle note of comedy in this scene: JD’s rationalizations for Young thinking he’s gay, and his sense that the definition of the word gay is “too much information,” and his fixation on the sexuality aspect above everything else. But there’s this sharp turn towards the tragic if you read Young saying “Maybe you could tell her after I’m gone” as “Maybe you could tell her after I’m dead.”

The ghost steer story is something I heard on a school ranch trip in Texas. It’s about a steer with red eyes that everyone tries to brand, so that it’s covered with all these glowing brands. I… don’t remember why this was supposed to be frightening, except I guess that it was a red-eyed steer covered with glowing brands?

From early in the existence of the cabin, I knew Young was going to go there when he was on Earth, and I knew that he was going to find it too small and too constricting in a way that reflected his old life versus what he’s become through Rush. 

He’s pretty much straight-up Rush in most of this conversation with Chloe, which is maybe why she gets worried and sort of traps him into saying he’ll give her away at the wedding, with the implication that if he didn’t commit to it, he might not be alive by then.

It was hard to try and communicate the situation that Young finds himself in, because we don’t really have the right words for it. I don’t think Young is not a person without Rush; it’s just that he got used to being another person _with_ Rush, so now he’s simultaneously a person and half a person in a way that connects to what Rush struggled with on the planet, when he reflected that possibly he was one hundred percent himself but now being himself required more than that. This is part of the problem I’m writing my dissertation about, by the way. 

This is the first time Young cries, I think.

And then he turns himself into almost-Rush to survive. There’s a whole discussion that could be had here about the problem of wanting to _be_ the beloved versus wanting to _possess_ the beloved, although the fact that there the lover and the beloved are not really separate people complicates the whole thing. 

Note that the narration immediately becomes Rush narration, but Rush narration that’s better-structured than normal. At the Mountain, it’s sort of like Young’s thoughts as narrated by Rush, which was surprisingly tricky to pull off, but very fun to play with. 

Young’s fuck-you to Landry is perhaps a bit authorial-voice, but I still delight in it. And then there’s a nice double meaning in the last two lines: “There’s something different about you.” “Yes. There is.”

I was never entirely sure if the end of this last psychiatrist’s appointment came off quite the way I wanted it to. I was trying to pack a lot of meanings into Mackenzie’s very ambiguous question: Were you in love with him? Was Destiny in love with you? But there was also this level of: what about you? What happens to you? That seemed like an important question, even on a meta level, because so much of the original story was about _Rush_ , and in some ways I made my version into Young’s story. 

**Chapter 72**

As soon as I knew that Chloe’s wedding was going to be the site of the story’s conclusion, I knew it was going to be on the beach. I don’t really know why? Obviously it makes for a beautiful and striking visual, which is not unimportant, but I think perhaps also there’s something about the presence of the water, which for so long has represented fear and the buried past, but here becomes something peaceful and beautiful. There’s also what Chloe thinks about in this opening section: the nonhuman, the secret world, the hidden life in all things.

The idea of it being important to make promises out loud is a slight echo of something from Greer’s interlude. It has to do with performativity, a little— you enact something by performing it in a social setting.

I have a terrible weakness for working emails into fics. I like getting the chance to play with different narrative styles. And I wanted to give more of a sense of Young and Chloe’s relationship than Young’s interludes, which were so focused on his trauma and grief, had really allowed. 

I think a major part of recovery is often what Chloe describes: not asking yourself, “What am I supposed to want?”

I would have liked to write more emails in Ancient, but (a) I wasn’t sure how much patience readers would have with that, and (b) long passages of Ancient took a LOT of time to come up with, especially if they were about things that there wouldn’t be Proto-Italic, Latin, or Ancient Greek words for, in which case I had to look at examples of how words had been developed in Italian or Greek, and think about how they might have developed in Ancient. I think at one point there’s an example I failed to note in this commentary when I mention something that’s supposed to be a computer tablet, but I called it a shortened version of “hand-window” in Latin.

I like to think that after the end of the story Chloe, Matt, Greer, and Park ended up hanging out more and talking about some of these things.

This never got worked into the fic in full, but Young set up a fund to identify and support gifted kids from troubled backgrounds.

Giving things away is one of the classic warning signs of suicidal ideation. 

The “Bat Boy Proves Riemann Hypothesis!” image exists.

Chloe echoes what Young used to think about Rush, that he was a piece of ice melting in his hands.

There’s a double meaning to “I have to get ready”/“I know you do” and the exchange between Chloe and Young that ends this interlude.

It was important for me that Chloe got to have a scene with TJ here— TJ’s probably the only person who Chloe _could_ have this conversation with, I think, because TJ knows everything that happened, but TJ’s also very nurturing, and a woman, and I think Chloe needs to have this conversation with a woman, who can understand some of the nuances of what she’s talking about when she talks about the wedding, and wanting certain things, and the pressure to want or not want certain things.

I made up this peacock-walking Berkeley fixture, because I needed them to be talking about something innocuous before they got into tradition. (I also like, though, the idea of Chloe and Matt shooting things together on the rifle range, because it’s… not quite normal? At least for their demographic. But it would seem normal to them.) 

Chloe is articulating my views here, about tradition. We got to hear part of her conversation with Rush about marriage back in chapter 31, when I commented that Chloe and Rush represent different philosophical positions on normativity: Chloe wants to expand or subvert normativity by insisting on her right to it when others would deny her that right; Rush’s attitude is: fuck normativity. Chloe makes a case for the validity of her position here when she says that if she accepted that she wasn’t allowed to want what she wants, she’d be agreeing that there was something wrong with her and, in a sense, reinscribing the normal/abnormal distinction that other people have imposed on her. So what she’s really doing is refusing to accept that distinction. There are arguments than can be raised against her view (our desires are socially constructed, so how legitimate can it ever be to hang our arguments on them, etc) but I find it pretty compelling in this case. 

I suppose it’s because I find both of their positions defensible that my resolution was to have this double wedding that, as I’ve mentioned, sanctions both of them. Chloe gets to wear a traditional dress and have a beautiful cake at a reception overlooking the beach, and Young gets to go become an ontologically complicated semi-separate energy being with his half-starship same-sex lover.

And that affirmation from TJ, which of course _isn’t_ about the wedding schedule, is so important— I think especially because it comes from an older woman who is more “normal” than Chloe.

I couldn’t resist going with the slightly on-the-nose Ancient flowers meanings: fidelity and change, appropriate for both of the wedding/“wedding”s that are about to take place. 

And… Chloe delivers the complicated moral of the story, having had to work this out for herself: it is what it makes itself, or what we make of it (depending on how you conceive of agency). Nothing stays the same. We move forwards.

I thought that Chloe would probably not have chosen music with violins in it, because she would have learned (either from Rush or from Young) about why Rush found it difficult to listen to them. “Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen” seems relatively easy to arrange for piano, and it’s a beautiful piece. Ian Bostridge chose it for one of his Desert Island Discs, because it was played at his wedding, so I had it in the back of my head.

And here’s the exchange that actually is, in the most non-patriarchal sense, about Young giving Chloe away: she’s ready to go be an adult on her own now, ready to lose him/Rush. 

 

**Chapter 73**

Writing this chapter was quite frightening, because I wanted it to be absolutely perfect. I could use some of the dialogue from the original story, but not a lot, and of course the context was completely different, so I was mostly on my own. 

There’s a little nod to the original story in Young and Chloe’s wedding dance— “Across the Universe” was the song Chloe performed at karaoke in the original story when Rush and Young left the party to go hook up. 

This was the hardest chapter to have Young think in Rush’s narration during, because Rush-narration tends to only be effective in huge paragraphs, and there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for that here. So I tried to get in some good chunks right off the bat, to establish that Young _was_ still being Rush. I think I write better in Rush’s voice; I’m very proud of this bit: “They didn’t know the first thing about who he was or wasn’t, and what might drive a person to become, which was to say unbecome, because really becoming was always at the same time an unbecoming, so perhaps to become you always had to hate yourself a bit, or have pain at least, an untapped energy resource, a black oil under the surface, a fuel, and in his case had it even been under the surface, had he ever bothered burying it, as Rush had said to do?” I’m not sure all of that is true, but it is true that becoming is always an unbecoming, which has been one of the big problems in this story.

Please allow me to paint you a picture of the type of writer I am: I looked up about ten videos of Monterey beaches and sunsets so I could be sure that I was somewhat accurate in my description of the stairs, the beach, the sunset…. everything.

I _really_ felt that Young needed to have the chance to deliver these good few solid paragraphs of extremely well-deserved excoriation. I cried writing the “You know what I remember about him?” one, because that felt like the most brutal and the most deserved accusation— Rush suffered enormously, but he had Young there to take care of him. When Young was suffering, Rush wasn’t there. So Young has good reason to accuse Rush of not giving a fuck. 

The most technically difficult part of this was the pacing of Young’s gradual acceptance of Rush— when and how he would stop being angry. I tried to accomplish that through having Young _want_ to accept Rush, even though he’s so terribly hurt; he touches Rush in part because he can’t quite believe it’s Rush, but also because he can’t quite bear not to, and there’s the explicit connection to Rush touching Young after coming back from the planet, when he was frightened and didn’t believe Young was real. There’s another of those hello/hello exchanges, this time “Nick”/“Hello,” which is, as ever, a kind of intimate recognition.

But Young hasn’t really moved past being hurt yet; he still does make it clear how vast what Rush has done to him is. And when he says “I don’t know how to let you in,” there’s a double meaning there. 

I did need Young to be the one who kissed Rush, because Young is the wronged party, and Young is the one who needs to decide when he’s prepared to do that. But in the kiss, then, I wanted it to be clear that Rush is also extremely vulnerable here, as he goes on being for a good bit. This dynamic continues: Young gets to finally assert some control over his mind, deciding what’s going to be a part of it and what’s not, and we see how important Young’s _self_ is to Rush.

When Young thinks that this had always been the choice, I think he’s referring not to the literal choice he’s faced with, but to the larger choice: he was never going to be able to rejoin the world with Rush. Normativity was never an option. (That… would have been a better slogan, Magneto.) Rush was always going to be too transgressive, too liminal, too unable to fit into categories. And Young had to decide whether that was the life he wanted to lead. But by this point, he’s made that decision. He’s already come to the realization that he doesn’t want to go back to fitting inside the old, normative version of the cabin. It’s not just that he loves Rush; it’s that he doesn’t want to give up the ways in which he’s grown through loving Rush. And that was _always_ what Rush had trouble seeing or accepting, so of course Rush can’t believe that Young would choose him. 

The “Normally I’d say I’m not going to stand here all day” declaration is a bit more direct and sentimental than what I usually write. But it tied in thematically here, and I think… possibly Rush needed it? 

I liked the idea that “it” here is still something that is yet to be discovered, something unknown, something that they have to find out together. 

There’s probably something deep to say about the not-real dog tags and how that wasn’t really the point, like whether or not Rush was the “real” Rush wasn’t the point, but… I would have to think about it more.

This is about where I imagined Feist’s “I Feel it All” playing at Chloe’s reception, I think.

FINALLY, FINALLY they’re able to say that they love each other. But it sort of had to be in this very casual (or faux-casual) way, after they’ve literally confessed to the fact that they need each other to be the type of being they want to be. Typical.

I _always_ wanted Young to write this giant message on the beach. I researched tide tables for Monterey to make sure it wouldn’t get erased, and while I can’t confirm high and low tide for 2011, based on the tables for March of this previous year, it seems like they’d be leaving the message at low tide, so it would be there for a while. (I learned my lesson about tide tables when I went mudlarking on the Thames.) It was very important for me to make sure that Chloe knew Young was with Rush, and that they loved her.

And we get this whole explanation of ascension in terms of potential, excess, growth. This is very predictable if you know me.

I found it surprisingly emotional to write this description of Young’s life— right from the start, in terms of Rush having rebuilt him from wreckage and held his fragments with such love. In a way, this also made sense of how their two arcs fit together— because each of them came to the lowest possible point, the point at which they had nothing left, when they’d lost _everything_ , before they could understand how much more there was to want. 

The last paragraph in this section! I’M SO HAPPY WITH MYSELF.

THE WHOLE LITTLE END-SECTION. I’M A GENIUS, FOR ABOUT THREE PARAGRAPHS AT A TIME, AFTER MONTHS OF WORK!

 

**Chapter 74**

The original story had an epilogue showing Rush and Young’s ascended life, but I had a very different idea of what I wanted to do. I knew that I wanted to emphasize that they weren’t just, like, living a normal existence that happened to be on another plane; their whole concept of spacetime and dimensions and so forth had changed, and they were freely moving in and out of being one and two people. (The Stargate shows are very dodgy and illogical about ascension actually entails, which they get around by having people who de-ascend lose their memories of ascension, so I went my own way.) I wanted to have the three voices: Rush, Young, and their combined voice. 

But I also was very attached to the idea of them having a version of the cabin! I wrestled with this, because I think science fiction tends to be very limited in conceptualizing alternative forms of existence, and I didn’t want to be fall into that trap. HOWEVER, I could kind of justify it by arguing that representations of energy/higher-plane life also tend to assume that material existence is somehow not as sophisticated, which is an idea that has a tedious history.

So I started them out as having this very alien form of existence, where they can sort of materialize as they like or _not_ materialize, and engage with multiple potential realities (DON’T get me started on this; I will talk for hours about how this might or might not be possible, and in that case, can they only see realities where they ascended, etc, etc) before they interconvert to their ancient alien cabin in the Tadpole Galaxy. That way, it’s established that this is not their only form of life.

But I wanted the cabin to also not be traditionally domestic, so we have the notion of it existing in a lot of dimensions, and Rush stashing pocket dimensions under the stairs, and there being all these strange machines that I made up. I mean, I also didn’t want it to be exactly like it _had_ been, because I also wanted it to have grown and changed as they grew and changed.

All of that said— this was also, of course, a chance to indulge my absurd sense of humor and emphasize how much they were still Rush and Young. And the AI! Because even though the AI got what it wanted in being the structure and self-love that helped to heal Rush, I just… wanted there to be a little more for it. So there’s this reference to Rush being very attached to sex and sleep, maybe because of himself, and maybe because of the bit of the AI that’s in him.

I just really feel like I managed to hit exactly the ending notes that I wanted here: first, the happiness that is _theirs_ , then the idea that having nothing be simple is the best possible state of affairs, and, finally, in their not-entirely-separate thoughts, the last reminder that there is always more life.


End file.
